Sounds pretty perfect, doesn’t it? Alas, I’m not talking about marital bliss, nor is this a page out of The Stepford Wives. It’s a glimpse into what everyday life with personal robots might resemble in the not-so-distant future.

Although she once promised to destroy humankind, Sophia by Hanson Robotics is the supermodel of cyborgs: an eerily attractive humanoid with a penchant for nonverbal communication. She and others like her operate on an artificial intelligence platform and have the ability to measure and react to unspoken human emotion. Not only can these robots read and acknowledge nonverbal social cues but they can also respond in kind with appropriate expressions and gestures of their own. And according to founder David Hanson, this is just the beginning. The future will bring us robots “as conscious, creative and capable as any human,” he asserts.

Alas, while Hanson hasn’t disclosed when Sophia will be available to the public, never fear; Pepper is here. Lauded as “the first humanoid robot designed to live with humans,” it was initially created for commercial use, but the public outcry for a personal version rapidly changed the corporate vision. Spicing up your life will run you about $14,000 over the course of three years (an initial hardware outlay of $1,600 plus the required $360 monthly subscription). What you get for your money is a robot that can gesture, encourage and serve as your home’s technical hub. But Pepper’s most notable feat is not what it can do but how it decides to do it. For example, if the robot thinks you look sad, it may suggest calling your bestie for a mood-lifting chat. If Pepper reads anger in your facial expressions, it may offer up some breathing exercises to help you cool off. Or if it thinks you look a bit bored, it may spin a tune and bust a move.

Photography provided by Trunk Archive

For the truly technologically inclined, next year’s Aeolus represents the robotic holy grail. Arguably the most highly anticipated personal robot of all time, it gives The Jetsons’ Rosey a run for her money when it comes to performing household chores. In addition to completing tasks like sweeping and vacuuming, Aeolus can learn to identify 1,000+ household items — all the better to pick them up and put them in their proper place. What’s more, it begins to recognize each family member (via facial recognition, of course) and their preferences, a knack that helps it predict which items each person is most likely to request. In other words, this hard-wired honey is at your beck and call to fetch your favorite snack while you binge watch some Netflix.

While many (myself included) would consider a robot that cleans the house the best thing since sliced bread, some people are seeking out robots with some very — ahem — specialized talents. Meet Roxxxy TrueCompanion ($10,000 plus required subscription), a humanoid robot with remarkably lifelike features and enough AI to carry on a conversation, react to touch, display mood and emotion, and even speak several languages. Fully customizable (and I do mean fully), Roxxxy comes replete with all the necessary bells and whistles right out of the box. She even boasts a handful of alternate personalities like “Wild Wendy” and “S & M Susan.” If you haven’t yet guessed, Roxxxy is a bona-fide love machine, and the TrueCompanion head honchos make no bones as to her primary function.

While the talents that Roxxxy brings to the table — or the bed, as the case may be — are pretty apparent, a sex robot’s mere existence raises some big questions (among other things). Namely, can someone find happiness with a robot given that AI can only offer artificial love? The experts have their doubts. “People form [emotional] expectations,” warns Matthias Scheutz, director of Tufts University’s Human-Robot Interaction Laboratory, “and the robot will inevitably disappoint.”

But the issue of ethics in robotics goes far beyond those programmed for X-rated activities. Ask any soccer mom who has run one too many carpools what she’s lusting after, and chances are the idea of a self-driving car will elicit wanton desire. While driver-less personal vehicles aren’t yet available to the public, an autonomous rideshare program called Waymo is. And although the idea of never again having to make small talk with a cabby does have exponential appeal, fully autonomous cars as they currently exist are far from perfect. Case in point: The AI (literally) driving these vehicles can avoid obstacles, but it can’t necessarily determine what those obstacles are. And it’s that inability to differentiate between a speed bump and, say, a puppy that’s keeping fully autonomous automobiles from replacing the family Volvo.

So how do you teach ethics to a robot? Enter the Moral Machine, MIT’s platform for “gathering a human perspective on moral decisions made by machine intelligence.” A macabre video game version of Philippa Foot’s Trolley Problem, it has elevated the philosophical debate by introducing the phenomenon of crowdsourcing. The premise is simple: Online users watch a series of scenarios illustrating dilemmas involving self-driving cars and select what they believe to be the moral choice. The information gleaned is then used to inform decisions that AI must make in the future. Call it ethics by committee if you will, but the need for such intel is immediate and fast rising.

Around the world, people in countries like Japan and Korea have already embraced personal robots in their homes, and by next year, it’s expected that one in 10 American households will own a consumer robot, according to Juniper Research. Indeed, this future isn’t some fantasy in a galaxy far, far away. Much like computers, smartphones and all the other once-inconceivable technology we now use in our everyday lives, personal robots are very real. And, ready or not, here they come.

“Will robots change our lives in the future?” muses robotics pioneer Mark Tilden. “Robots won’t just change our lives in the future, they’ll expand them. Not just for fun, but for necessity. We’ve taken the first steps into welcoming them into our homes; we just have to wait a bit to proctor them into making us more human.” 

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Situated 200 miles off the shore of Nova Scotia, Canada, the peach-tinted sand dune floats in the middle of nowhere, attached to nothing. Sable is less than a mile wide at its waist and 25 miles long. Not one tree exists on its landscape. Beach grass feeds the resident horses. The absence of soil and stones makes this one of the most unique ecosystems on earth. A forsaken shapeshifter, Sable morphs with the tides and gales. Dunes erode at the same time they’re being built.

Photography by Sandy Sharkey

Thanks to its untamed mystery, the isle is powerful and hopelessly romantic. Artists become entranced by its undeniable mysticism and its wild characters. “To me, Sable Island is the explorer’s dream,” explains photographer Drew Doggett. “I love the weight of Sable’s mythology; when you’re on the island, you can feel the presence of its history. The only way to interact with the island is the way it allows you to do so. As much as I set myself up for the photos I have in mind, the island has its own plans.”

He’s right. Sable is an enigma. And part of its appeal is the incredible effort required to get there. Since 2013 when the isle became a national park reserve, Parks Canada has carefully managed travel requests from tour operators, who bring visitors during the short season from June to October. Tourists arrive by watercraft, helicopter or small plane with eight to 10 others. Timing is everything, as the unpredictable weather controls who comes and goes from this wild dune of wind and water.

Once you get there, you can’t stay overnight. And when you leave, you can’t take anything with you. If you find, say, a Coke bottle from 1965 along the shoreline, it has to stay. “When you leave, you see your footprints in the sand,” explains wild horse photographer Sandy Sharkey. “But then within seconds, the breeze covers them up. It’s like you were never there.”

Sable was first recorded on a map in 1502, although it’s unclear who discovered it. Some historians say it was the Portuguese, who fished these waters, while others posit it was the Basques or the Vikings. Settlers tried to colonize the isle in the 1550s, but they ultimately abandoned those plans — along with their animals and belongings — when conditions became unbearable.

The nickname “Graveyard of the Atlantic” is a fitting one. Some 350 shipwrecks have been recorded, the most notable being the 1737 wreck of the Catherine, in which 98 souls perished. The island’s wrath is two-fold. First, it rests upon an unseen continental shelf the size of the Grand Canyon. Second, its unique positioning creates a terrifying vortex of the Labrador Current and the Gulf Stream that picks up ships and sets them on sandbars like plastic toys.

There’s one person who knows Sable best: naturalist Zoe Lucas, who’s been compared to Jane Goodall. Now the president of the Sable Island Institute, she first visited in the seventies. “As soon as I stepped off the plane, I was swept away,” she notes. For four decades, she was one of the only people living on the isle full-time, studying the horses and working on dune restoration. Although she no longer calls Sable home, she visits whenever possible.

The island remains inhospitable for a variety of reasons: Farming isn’t practical without proper soil. Rivers don’t exist, nor do brooks of fresh water. Winter’s cold threatens the existence of any livestock, and fog and quicksand are serious summer perils. Finally, waste disposal is nearly impossible.

So what was it like living on this unlivable island? “Endless — I was constantly seeing and learning,” Lucas says. Passionate about stabilizing environments compromised by human activity, she stayed in an isolated field camp to monitor and care for the isle. She lived an hour’s walk from the main station, without power or running water. Supplies were flown in every two weeks, weather permitting.

“I find the island fascinating,” Lucas explains. “It’s remarkable and unusual. An answer to a question opens up four more. In my entire adult life, I’ve never been bored.” She spent most of her 40 years on Sable documenting the behaviors of the horses to better understand how they could survive the treacherous conditions. And her stories are akin to The Black Stallion.

Lucas followed one stallion from foal hood to death. He was badly injured in a fight with another stallion in his younger years, losing an eye. She wasn’t sure he would survive, but he came back with a vengeance and built one of the strongest bands of horses she ever recorded. Lucas named him Gem, after the horse in the children’s book Pit Pony by Joyce Barkhouse.

Horses are thought to have first arrived on Sable in the 1750s by ship, captured by the British from the Acadians. Their unique characteristics — bulging noses, muscular shoulders, low-set tails — resemble a blend of the North African Barb, the Canadian horse and equines from early American colonies. Now protected by the government, the island population has ranged from 150 to 500 in recent years, with family bands made up of eight to 10 horses.

Sable is their home and all they know, from birth to death. When their time is up, their bodies become part of the blowing sand. On the island, horses pay humans no mind. If you’re roaming along the sand road, it’s not uncommon for a stallion to plod by without taking notice, his long mane scraping tufts of sandwort. “These horses are completely, from the ground up, Sable Island,” photographer Sharkey muses. “They are the sand, the surf, the sun, the wind. They absolutely symbolize freedom.”

The horses’ fate is ever shapeshifting, just like the isle itself. Sable is subject to natural erosion thanks to the ocean, with peak elevation sinking 25 feet over the past century. The opportunities to visit are dwindling, too. “Embracing natural change is part of being on Sable Island,” Lucas says. “Working and living on Sable, everything is about the weather. Everything you do is built around the tides.”

There was once a light keeper’s house on Sable, but it’s since been buried in sand. Ships no longer run aground the island. Humans come and go; seabirds cry in the gales. And the dunes endure, despite Mother Nature’s wrath. Nobody really knows if Sable is growing or shrinking, but ultimately, it may be doomed to disappear. As most mysteries go, one day, we may wonder if Sable Island and its wild horses ever existed at all.

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The lock is part of the oldest, most traveled inland waterway in America, a 2,300-mile corridor that connects the Atlantic Ocean with all five Great Lakes and the Mississippi River. Since deep-draft navigation opened on the St. Lawrence in 1959, more than 2.5 billion tons of cargo, worth some $375 billion, have traversed the seaway.

I’d been waiting 20 minutes for my ride — a 740-foot freighter called the Algoma Equinox. The Equinox traverses the St. Lawrence and four Great Lakes twice a month, transporting iron ore west and grain back east. Like many freighters around the world, it also occasionally carries people. Travelers willing to take the slow boat get a private cabin, three meals a day and shore leave wherever the ship loads, unloads or stops at a lock.

After picking me up in Montreal, the Equinox’s captain, Ross Armstrong, told me the ship would cross Lakes Ontario, Erie, Huron and Superior, and drop me in Thunder Bay, Ontario — six hours north of Duluth. The trip would take six days.

Three crew members lowered a steel gangplank onto the parking-lot curb, and I dragged my roller bag onto the ship. The Equinox is almost the exact size of New York City’s 60-story Carnegie Hall Tower leaned over on its side. The long, blue hull floated just a few feet above the water, weighed down by 33,000 tons of iron-ore pellets in the cargo holds.

All three crew members wore coveralls and hard hats. One, from Newfoundland, introduced himself as Tony. He looked like a Tony, with a bushy black mustache, pudgy cheeks and curly black hair. “You’ll be in the owner’s cabin,” he said. “Better hurry up; supper’s almost over.”

It was 5 p.m. on a warm June day. The sun was still high overhead, and the air smelled like river water and algae. Fluorescent lights gave the interior of the ship a pale blue hue. The halls were timeless in a way that any steel room, like a prison cell, is timeless. My cabin was on the third floor, starboard side. It was surprisingly large. The queen-size bed could have been transplanted from a Comfort Inn. The separate sitting area had a chipboard desk and a mini fridge, and there was an en-suite bathroom by the foot of the bed. The walls were covered with white plastic panels. The curtains were a kind of shiny plastic I had never seen before. Behind them, two oversize portholes looked out on a constantly moving scene.

I dropped my bags and headed straight to the mess hall. It was empty, something that appeared to please the cook, Mike Newell. The two-room dining area and kitchen were his domain, though it seemed as if he would trade the keys for a plane ticket home. For a man who openly hated his job, Newell cooked a hearty meal. The first night’s menu: chicken curry, rice, steaks, spaghetti, meatballs, short ribs, steamed veggies, salad, pie, and a choice of a dozen nonalcoholic juices and drinks.

Newell self-flagellated with a dishtowel as he told me about riding lakers. He was 62 and had been sailing for 41 years. He had cloudy blue eyes and gray hair and opened his shirt a couple of buttons lower than other crew members. He was a mate once. He was an ordinary seaman who worked the decks, too. He was laid off, rehired, laid off again.

In the old days, he said, the mess hall was crowded 24 hours a day. Sailors played cards, gambled, got drunk and got into knife fights. Ex-cons, Hells Angels, mental patients and gang members hiding from the law worked there. Every now and then, one would disappear over the rail in the middle of the night. There was such a demand for labor that if someone was fired, he’d be hired the next day by a competitor. When Newell reached 25 years of service, the company gave him a clock mounted on a brass helm. He responded, “You should have given me a Congressional Medal of Honor for surviving!”

Newell was still talking an hour later when I slipped out of the mess hall to catch the sunset. Armstrong gave me permission to roam the ship as long as I wore a hard hat outside — and didn’t fall overboard. The sun was still above the treetops, and silhouetted skyscrapers in downtown Montreal 10 miles northeast looked like penciled-in shadows. The 9,400-horsepower engine vibrated the deck and every surface as the ship motored toward Lac St.-Louis.

A rain shower hit, carried by a ferocious wind. Five minutes later, it passed, and the evening sun hammered the deck. I had never moved this slowly as a passenger and wondered if I would lose my mind with boredom in the next six days. But the pace was meditative, too. From the 75-foot-tall wheelhouse, you notice things onshore you would typically miss in a car, train or plane: kids playing lacrosse in a dried-up hockey rink, a teenager peeking into his neighbors’ windows with a drone, a red fox hunching his back and relieving himself on a beautifully manicured lawn.

The canal opened into Lac St.-Louis, where it was nearly four miles wide, then narrowed again near Île Perrot. We were 300 miles due north of New York City and on the same latitude as Portland, Oregon. Elms and cottonwood bent in the breeze, casting shadowy fingers onto the water. White cedar and ash grew close to the river, where 350,000 cubic feet of water passed every second. Moraines and gentle drumlins rose and fell along the riverside, creating miniature highlands shrouded in red oak and sugar maple. In between, peat bogs were laced with the skeletons of fallen trees.

Two riders on a bike path lining the dike left us in the dust. I found it hard to believe that we would be in Minnesota in six days. In my mind, it was difficult to connect Montreal and Minnesota by water at all. I was so used to driving and flying that the shape of the continent had been distorted. You get on a plane or interstate in New York and get off in Minneapolis. Or Chicago. Or Los Angeles. Most people don’t travel anymore. They arrive. Unless you are riding the slow boat. Then you see every mile.

The Great Lakes Basin spans 10 degrees of latitude and 18 degrees of longitude, set almost exactly between the Equator and the North Pole. The circumference of all five lakes combined is 10,500 miles, nearly half the distance around the world. An average of 200,000 cubic feet of precipitation falls somewhere on the lakes every second.

The first ships to sail the lakes were classic European schooners, sloops and brigs. Canallers were the workhorses of the mid-1800s, and by 1860, 750 of them were in service. The steam engine brought larger boats and larger locks, too. Steam barges called smokers spoke to each other using “whistle talk.” Next came hookers, whaleback tows and bulkers, before steel ocean freighters sailed up the St. Lawrence and the age of the modern laker began.

These days, ore boats, straight deckers, bulkers, stern enders, self-unloaders, longboats and lake boats deliver 180 million tons of cargo to and from the lakes annually. Most goes to or comes from electric utilities, steel mills, construction companies, mining companies, factories and farms. Because a freighter can transport a ton of cargo 576 miles on a single gallon of fuel — compared with 413 miles by train or 155 miles by truck — shipping is often a greener way to move freight and people as well.

Many shipping companies, like CMA CGM, Grimaldi Lines and Rickmers-Linie, offer passenger cabins on certain routes. Prices average around $100 a day for trips to most major international ports. Specialty travel agencies, like A la Carte Freighter Travel and Maris, book transatlantic and around-the-world trips, and others, like ZIM Integrated Shipping Services, take applications for artist residencies on their ships.

Great Lakes freighters are unique in that almost all passenger tickets are sold through nonprofit fundraisers — mostly to benefit shipping museums — so booking a room is not easy. I got lucky while researching a book about America’s northern border when I met Peter Winkley, vice president of Algoma Central. The border splits the St. Lawrence River and four Great Lakes, and the Equinox follows the line almost the entire journey. The only way to see it up close is on a ship, and Winkley offered me a ride.

The Equinox is the most advanced bulker on the Great Lakes. Algoma captains, engineers and naval architects designed it, making it 45% more fuel efficient than Algoma’s existing fleet. They added a computerized, gear-less engine that occupies four stories of the engine room as well as gas scrubbers on the smokestack, which remove 97% of emitted sulfur. The result is the fastest, largest, most efficient ship sailing all five Great Lakes.

Still, the next morning, mustard yellow exhaust fell from the smokestack and hovered a few feet above the water. Thick bands of clouds blocked the sun. The Equinox deck glowed dull red. Every handle is painted white, and safety instructions are bright yellow.

Wearing a polo shirt, jeans and Crocs, Captain Armstrong looked more like a retired police officer on vacation than the captain of a $40-million ship. He was 27 when his father, a lifetime Great Lakes captain, called him from Quebec City and asked if he wanted to be a deck hand. Thirty-five years later, he was celebrating his third decade as a captain.

The job is more demanding than it looks, he said. The lakes sit in a lowland between the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachians, creating a vortex of dangerous weather. Winds can blow 40 to 50 knots and whip up waves 25 feet tall. The slender, flexible lakers seek shelter or heave-to to survive these storms. The Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum estimates that 6,000 ships and 30,000 lives have been lost on the lakes. The most famous wreck, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, sank a few hundred miles ahead on our route.

The wheelman stood behind Armstrong, clutching a surprisingly tiny, computerized steering wheel. He wore driving gloves and turned the Equinox every few seconds in whatever direction the captain told him to. The wheel, computer monitors and what looked like a server farm filling the wheelhouse are indicative of changes in the shipping industry. Twenty years ago, it took 35 crew members to run a laker. The Equinox operates with 16, only a handful of whom are on duty at once.

I stepped onto the wheelhouse deck in Chippewa Bay to see Thousand Islands, New York, summer home to millionaires for a century and a half. There are 1,864 islands along the 50-mile stretch, many of which were retreats for business moguls and movie stars during the Gilded Age. Singer Castle’s 60-foot walls and terra-cotta roof, built by Frederick Gilbert Bourne of the Singer Sewing Machine Co., passed a few hundred yards to starboard. A couple miles farther, we passed within a few hundred feet of another castle built by George Boldt, proprietor of New York City’s original Waldorf Astoria, as well as Deer Island, a retreat for Yale’s Skull and Bones club.

The channel was so tight in the American Narrows that the Equinox completely filled it. Jetskis and mahogany runabouts zipped 30 feet in front of the bow and alongside the gunwales. An SOS message came across the VHF radio saying that a private boat had lost power and drifted into the shipping lane, and I asked the wheelman how long it would take the Equinox to stop. “It doesn’t stop,” he said. “You should see this place at night. Or in the fog.”

That evening, we passed the windmills and farms of Wolfe Island then broke into a deep blue plain. From the bow, Lake Ontario looked like an endless silvery horizon. The air was still, and the view ahead was so wide I could see the curvature of the earth. The only sign of land was a smokestack 20 miles away on the southern shore.

Seeing a Great Lake for the first time, I understood how French explorers, who discovered “the sweet seas” and essentially blazed the border with Canada, assumed that the lakes led to the Pacific — and to China. Most 17th century mapmakers estimated that North America was only 300 miles wide, and every indication on the edge of Lake Ontario suggested that the lake went on forever.

Seagulls circled the smokestack and a gentle swell from the last storm gently rolled the ship. The sun was a bonfire three fingers off the horizon, and an exact image of the sky reflected off the surface of the water. The first mate throttled up to 17 miles an hour, and the bow of the Equinox plowed ahead. Foam breaking off the hull turned green as it slid along the sides of the ship then split from the stern in a wide V.

The sky was dark the next morning. The land was dark, too. Flames blazed above tall, cylindrical smokestacks, casting an orange light on the Equinox. The waterfront was barricaded by black, pyramidal dunes of coal and iron-ore pellets at the ArcelorMittal Dofasco steel mill. My watch read 9 a.m. We were docked in Hamilton, Ontario, the steel capital of Canada.

Unloading takes about a day, so Armstrong gave me shore leave until 10 p.m. I took a cab straight to Jamesville, an unlikely arts district that recently popped up in Hamilton. I found a half dozen art galleries, three coffee shops, a smoothie bar, eight restaurants and two boutique saloons on North James Street alone. The neighborhood didn’t look like Manhattan’s Chelsea, but it didn’t look like a steel town, either.

I wandered all day through shops and public parks, looking at hand-cut wood prints, paintings, a recording studio, a mixed-media art center and the Hamilton farmers’ market, the oldest indoor market in Canada (founded in 1837). That evening at a bar called the Brain — where the owner was mid-binge with an artist friend from Berlin — a patron in skinny black jeans showed off a print headed for New York City. It was a matted grid of 28 life rings from Great Lakes ships.

Neighborhoods grew progressively darker and poorer as I rode in a cab back to the waterfront that night. An orange cloud hovered over the steel mill, and flames flickered above Dofasco’s smokestacks. Inside Gate 15, earthmovers roared as they pushed around piles of iron and coal.

Nothing had changed inside the Equinox. The forced-air system whirred. The fluorescent lights made hallways and cabins bright and sterile. The only smell was of spaghetti sauce in the mess hall, where a lone crewman sat staring at his food.

By the time I woke the next morning, the Equinox had finished unloading, crossed Lake Ontario and cleared two locks in the Welland Canal, an engineering marvel that circumvents Niagara Falls. The first Welland Canal was dug between Lakes Erie and Ontario in 1829. The current one lifts ships 326 vertical feet up the Niagara escarpment over 27 miles and eight locks.

Armstrong let me off at Lock 3 and told me I had six hours to explore Niagara before reboarding at Lock 8. I climbed a rope ladder up the lock wall and walked to a cab that took me to the Table Rock Welcome Centre on the Canadian side of the falls. A rock wall with an ornate steel railing held back 1,200 humans gazing at the second largest waterfall on the planet. It is a strange thing to see a wonder of the world in the flesh after gazing at photos of it a thousand times. I spent a half hour watching the river wend around rocks and submerged logs, then accelerate and shoot forward, cascading, ricocheting and vaporizing into a white cloud of mist before coalescing into a cushion of foam.

What you don’t see in photos is the view the falls have of everyone looking at them, an explosion of tourism almost as breathtaking as the cataract itself. I embraced the chaos for a moment over a Jack Daniel’s New York strip steak at TGI Fridays — near the Guinness World Records Museum, Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, Upside Down House, Brick City toy museum, Movieland Wax Museum of the Stars, and the Haunted House. Then I caught a cab to an older world in Port Colborne at the opposite end of the canal.

Port Colborne sits on Lake Erie and is the kind of place where local legends include a high-school kid who played in the NHL and a World War II Canadian battleship named after the town. Like Hamilton, it has become a chic weekender destination and is packed with gift shops, cafés and the incredible three-generation Minor Fisheries cafeteria, where your breaded and fried perch comes in daily from the local fishing fleet.

The Equinox eased into Lock 8 around 6 p.m. After I boarded, Armstrong directed the ship into Lake Erie. Sunset comes slowly on the Great Lakes. The surface of the water morphed into an antique mirror, clouded and rippled. Before long, land on the far shore became a shadowy thumbnail, marked by a dozen bristling towers and smokestacks.

The final leg of the journey through Lakes Huron and Superior was the fastest. There is one stop at Soo Locks between those lakes, and the ship cruises at top speed the rest of the way. We were in the Detroit River when I woke the second to last day. After I had coffee and an omelet, Detroit appeared like a house of mirrors off the port bow. From there, we steamed past Belle Isle into Lake St. Clair, through the St. Clair River and Lake Huron. Sometime that night, we turned north up St. Mary’s River to the Soo Locks at Sault Ste. Marie and continued west across Lake Superior.

The fog set in on the last night, and I couldn’t see the bow of the ship. The dampness and cold penetrated my jacket on deck, and beads of water formed on my eyelashes. There were no buoys, rocks or ships. You could see them on the radar but not through the windshield. “Lake’s too cold,” the wheelman said.

I woke in the middle of the night and looked through the porthole. The fog had lifted, and Superior was black and calm. The average depth of the lake is 483 feet. Off Grand Island, the bottom drops to 1,333 feet. Somewhere down there, the Midcontinent Rift, a giant scar of hardened magma where the North American continent split in two a billion years ago, runs across the bottom. Deep-water ciscoes swim through the deepest trenches of the lake. Native lake trout and lake herring circle above them. Sleek black loons, herring gulls, harlequin ducks and oldsquaw dive at the fish on the surface, and eagles, falcons, terns and plovers glide above.

Before I went to bed, I had packed my things. I couldn’t imagine riding a boat for three months, much less 30 years as a career seaman. I stared at the ceiling for an hour, wondering if I would fall asleep. I imagined the 100-foot cliffs that border the northern shore of Lake Superior passing by and gray wolves and black bear wandering through stands of paper birch and pine.

In a half sleep, I dreamed of the cottony white cloud covering the lake. Above the cloud, the moon seared a crescent into the sky. The ship made a long furrow through the mist, just the smokestack poking through. It was a clear night above and a whiteout below. Lights flickered onshore. Cars zipped along highways. America went on as usual while the giant ship slid forward in the silver light.

This article is reprinted in collaboration with The New York Times, where it first appeared in August 2016.

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Photography provided by the Dog Agency

Our obsession with our pets is nothing new, but it’s definitely reached new heights amid the pandemic. To wit: The global dog clothing and accessories market hit $9.74 billion last year and is expected to balloon to $16.61 billion by 2028, according to market research firm Million Insights. Our four-legged friends are leading the fashion industry and setting trends. They’re strutting down runways. They’re penning books. They’re headlining in shows like Netflix’s Pet Stars, a series that follows an animal talent management agency. Public relations — for pups!

Dressing up our dogs is a form of self-expression and drives our emotional connection with our pets. You could go as far as saying it’s science. Anthropomorphism, to be exact: the tendency to map human traits and emotions onto animals and inanimate objects. And it has an evolutionary purpose. For centuries, we’ve assigned human characteristics to non-human things to make sense of the world around us. Plus seeing our pets as human-like fulfills a social need — hence the rise in popularity during the past 18 months.

Although adorning our pets dates back millennia, modern dog fashion took off in the early 2000s, with celebrities like Paris Hilton toting around her decked-out Chihuahuas. Donatella Versace made furry fashion even more fabulous when she dressed up her Jack Russell terrier, Audrey, in bedazzled collars in the early 2010s.

Photography provided by the Dog Agency

“Pets are people’s children,” explains Loni Edwards, founder and CEO of the Dog Agency. The talent management firm was born out of her own dog’s Instagram fame in 2015 and today has offices in New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago. “People are waiting longer to have children, and they’re raising their pets instead. We buy them clothes. We feed them the best food. We bring them with us when we travel.”

It makes sense then that we can’t get enough of these celebrity canines — and that top brands have found a winning marketing strategy with them. Take Tika the Italian greyhound, with her 1.1 million Instagram followers. In a post of her wearing a Fendi jacket, she (or, more accurately, her human, Thomas Shapiro) nonchalantly writes, “You can take the girl out of Italy, but you can’t keep her away from exquisite Italian craftsmanship.” And for her 10th birthday, she posted a video of her donning a custom Shantell Design gown (one of her favorites) and cruising around her hometown of Montreal in the new Rolls-Royce Ghost.

There’s no question Tika has fabulous fashion sense. In an interview, she tells me (play along here), “My most expensive item is a coat made by Ashi Studio. It was handmade for me for Paris couture week, and I wore it virtually at their show. It’s Victorian-inspired and made out of crepe fabric and pleated organza with buttons down the front. Canine haute couture at its finest!”

Photography provided by Team Boobie

And she’s in good company in the doggie influencer club. Boobie Billie, a petite Italian greyhound/Chihuahua mix who sports silky babushkas, exploded on Instagram then launched her own fashion line, Boobie World, so humans can dress like her. Miniature purses dubbed Boobie Bags sell for $270, with matching babushkas going for $80.

Boobie Billie emails me like it’s really her — and I, a sucker for animals with fierce personalities, lap it right up. “I’m a firm believer in timeless accessories,” she (or more likely, her cheeky PR rep) says. “I have a pretty fabulous collection, but my Louis bag is probably my favorite. It’s like, colors and cuts come in and out, but a statement bag is forever.”

The business opportunities for these posh pooches go far beyond fashion. Case in point: A petite smooth-coated Brussels griffon named Sprout (get it?) just landed his first book deal. And Edwards of the Dog Agency released a primer for aspiring pet momagers earlier this fall, How to Make Your Dog #Famous: A Guide to Social Media and Beyond.

She’s certainly the authority on the subject. “At the Dog Agency, we exclusively represent around 150 animals,” Edwards explains. “We come in as their business partner, and most of what we do is digital. The rates vary per dog, but influencers with millions of followers are in the $10,000 to $15,000 per post range.”

Pups are, after all, safe brand ambassadors. They’re not going to get drunk at a party or get canceled when a questionable Tweet from 2016 resurfaces. “They’re extremely powerful marketing tools because they resonate with consumers on a deeper level,” she adds. “Pets are happy, and people associate those positive feelings toward the brand.”

High-end fashion houses like Dior, Fendi, Prada and Versace are getting in on the action, too, with specially designed collections. “The industry is finally realizing that people don’t want basic, boring pet products,” notes Christopher Cargnoni, founder of top-selling dog streetwear line Fresh Pawz. “They want high-quality products that match their own personal aesthetics so they can feel more connected with their dog.”

Photography provided by Pagerie

The cost for proper pooch fashion these days isn’t cheap because it’s a lifestyle. If you shop with ultra luxury dog fashion label Pagerie, for example, a leather harness costs a cool $720 and the matching leash $525. Maxbone, which aims to “reimagine the pet industry,” features astrology T-shirts, knit jumpers and Aspen coats for upward of $140. And a Ruby Rufus cashmere sweater will set you back $135.

Ruby Rufus Isaacs launched her eponymous line in 2013 with the help of Oprah Winfrey. “Somehow my luxury sweater prototypes ended up in the hands of Gayle King,” she says. “She flipped for them and showed them to Oprah. The next thing I know, O magazine wants to include a Ruby Rufus sweater in their Christmas gift guide. Our website crashed, and we sold out almost immediately.”

If Oprah’s involvement is any indication, the sky’s the limit for these barking brand ambassadors. Tika’s dreams of sitting front row at New York Fashion Week came true earlier this fall, while Boobie Billie hopes to land a Calvin Klein ad campaign. And why not? Brands are seeing a surge in engagement thanks to these canine celebrities, proving that fashion is more delightful on four legs. It’s good for business, and it’s good for our psyches. As Boobie Billie explains, it’s “a little moment of over-the-top extravagance to get us through it all.” 

Read this article as it appears in the magazine.

The post Inside the Billion-Dollar Dog Fashion Industry appeared first on Artful Living Magazine.

Photography by Eliesa Johnson

It’s a crisp 10 degrees out, and Jon Wipfli is stoking a wood fire while donning his favorite canvas overalls and a T-shirt. “You want to keep your body warm,” he says, “but it gets hot when you’re working over the flames!” The Minneapolis chef (known for his Minnesota Spoon brand) braves a cold day like this for only one kind of feast: an oyster roast. This low-country tradition involves shoveling mollusks onto a hot grill, covering them with a wet burlap sack and cooking them until they plump up and pop open from the steam.

Oysters? In winter? In Minnesota? The concept may seem like a hard sell, but Wipfli believes there’s something fittingly Northern about this Southern way of cooking. “To me, an oyster roast is about reveling in the challenges of winter, not hiding from them,” he explains. “You’re huddled around the fire, drinking a beer, and everyone gets involved with the shucking. We thrive on that sense of community in the colder months.” 

In the summer, an iced oyster on the half shell is refreshing. But when an oyster is gently smoked and basted in butter, it becomes downright decadent. “This is my kind of comfort food,” Wipfli declares. “When it’s cold all around you, the heat of the oysters is so satisfying. It warms you to the core.” Plus, oysters are at their best come wintertime; the pearly white mollusks become incredibly fatty and succulent in icy waters. And with fantastic local resources like the Fish Guys (Wipfli’s go-to), sourcing fresh oysters from both coasts is easy.

When he opened Animales Barbecue Co. — a 33-foot trailer-meets-smokehouse at Northeast Minneapolis’s Able Seedhouse + Brewery — last August, Wipfli knew that oysters would be a big part of the experience. Alongside 16-hour smoked brisket, locally sourced ribs and Lowry Hill Meats sausage, he cranks out roasted oysters for the masses in the colder months. To help in this endeavor, he commissioned a custom 150-pound steel oyster roaster with a shiny flat top and room for burning logs below.

Foodies in the know can snag tickets for the all-you-can-eat feasts, where Wipfli and his team shovel roasted oysters onto the long, paper-covered outdoor tables at Able (yes, even when the ground is covered in snow). It’s an immersive experience: Guests get a quick shucking lesson before digging into the heaps of steaming mollusks and tossing their discarded shells into buckets. The flurry of activity and radiating heat keep everyone warm. On a normal day, the Animales crew will cruise through 300-plus oysters in a couple hours.

With more than 4,000 roasted oysters under his belt, Wipfli believes this is something that you can — and should — be doing at home (albeit, at a slightly more relaxed pace). “The classic Southern style is a fun down-and-dirty way to do it,” he says, “but when I’m entertaining friends, I opt for the slower pace of a buttered oyster roast.” To pull this off in your own backyard, Wipfli recommends some essentials: a hot grill, a bag of oysters, your thickest winter coat and a few helpful friends.

A shoveled path leads through the snow to the grill. With a clean towel at the ready and an oyster knife peeking out from the front pocket of his bibs, Wipfli carefully arranges oysters on the piping hot grate. Once the shells pop, it’s all hands on deck for the shucking. People balance their beers while cradling the hot oysters in towels, taking care not to spill any of the precious juices. After the top shells come off, the oysters return to the grill for a crowning dollop of butter studded with bacon or spicy Thai chilies. 

The cold air fills with smoke, and everyone creeps in a little closer, eagerly waiting. It’s a friendly melee of shuck, butter, slurp, repeat. It’s low country meets North country. And for Wipfli, it’s the ultimate way to pass a cold winter afternoon. “Minnesotans spend the summer outside around the grill,” he says. “Why don’t we do the same in January?”

How to Host a Winter Oyster Roast

Don’t be intimidated at the idea of hosting a winter oyster roast. If you have your tools at the ready and a friend to help with the shucking, you can easily pull this off for a crowd. Start by grilling one or two oysters at a time until you hit your stride, then move up to larger batches.

Equipment
• A good pair of kitchen tongs
• Several kitchen towels for holding the hot oysters
• Several oyster knives (unless you plan to do all the shucking yourself)
• Your warmest winter gear

Smoke
A gas, wood or charcoal grill will do. Wipfli highly recommends scattering some soaked wood chips over the hot coals or placing a small smoker box under the grate of your gas grill. The aromatic smoke will go a long way to flavor the oysters. Whichever route you choose, make sure your grill is piping hot.

Oysters
When selecting oysters, defer to your fishmonger. You’re looking for medium-sized, reasonably priced ones from cold waters. No need to splurge; the unique nuances of a high-priced oyster will be overpowered by the smoke and flavored butter. East Coast oysters like Wellfleet and Blue Point are great options.

For serving size, Wipfli suggests starting with six mollusks per person. If you’re inviting over some serious oyster enthusiasts, up that to eight to 10.

Lastly, be sure to grill your oysters bowl side down. That way when the top shell pops open from the heat, the briny, flavorful oyster liquor will stay inside the shell.

Butter
Add some variety by experimenting with different flavored butters. If you’re pinched for time, use a good salted butter and serve with your favorite hot sauce. Bring butter to room temperature for easy scooping.

Libations
Pair your oysters with a creamy, malty stout like Able BLK WLF. This dry, dark beer balances out the fatty saltiness of the oysters. Prefer some vino? Local libation connoisseur Erik Eastman recommends pouring the refreshing, refined Via Emilia Cantina di Carpi Sparkling White Lambrusco. He describes it as “light, but not a shrinking violet, with plenty of things to say on the palate without dominating the conversation.”

Buttered Oyster Roast

Makes 6 to 8 servings

4 dozen medium-sized oysters, rinsed and scrubbed
compound butter

1. Set up grill for indirect cooking. If using a gas grill, preheat half of burners to high and leave others off. If using wood chips, place soaked chips in smoker box. Using tongs or sturdy grilling gloves, carefully lift grate on hot side of grill and place box on top of burners. Replace grate. If using a charcoal grill, heat coals until glowing. Scatter soaked wood chips over coals. Carefully push coals to one side then set grate on grill.
2. When grill is very hot, cook oysters in small batches, arranging bowl side down on hot side of grill. Cook uncovered 3 to 5 minutes, until flat top shell pops open. Using tongs, transfer to a platter, taking care not to spill any oyster liquor. Working one by one and cradling with a towel, quickly remove top shells and loosen oysters from bottom shells. Top each oyster with ½ tsp. compound butter and return to cool side of grill. Cook uncovered 2 minutes, until butter is just melted. Transfer to a platter and let cool slightly before serving. Repeat with remaining oysters.

Bacon Butter

Makes 2 cups 

Compound butter acts as an instant flavor enhancer when melted atop roasted oysters. The salty bacon here is a nod to Oysters Casino and adds the perfect touch of smoke. This recipe makes more compound butter than you’ll need, so save the leftovers for smearing on toast, glossing over pasta or stirring into brothy mussels. Can be made and refrigerated up to a week in advance.

4 strips apple wood–smoked bacon (about 4 ounces), finely chopped
1 medium shallot, minced
2 minced garlic cloves
1 Tbsp. fresh thyme leaves
1 tsp. black pepper
½ cup packed flat-leaf parsley leaves, finely chopped
1 pound unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 Tbsp. finely grated lemon zest
2 Tbsp. fresh lemon juice

1. In a medium nonstick skillet over moderate heat, cook bacon 5 to 7 minutes, stirring occasionally, until crisp. Drain excess fat. Add shallot, garlic, thyme and pepper, and cook 1 to 2 minutes, stirring occasionally, until shallot and garlic are translucent. Remove pan from heat and let cool completely. Fold in parsley.
2. In a medium bowl, combine bacon mixture, butter, lemon zest and lemon juice until evenly incorporated. Scrape into a storage container, cover and refrigerate until ready to use. For easy portioning, bring to room temperature.

Spicy Ginger Butter

Makes 2 cups

The peppery ginger and the clean heat of Thai chilies are unexpected complements to plump, smoky oysters. Any leftover butter is precious; use it to sauté shrimp or baste a thick ribeye steak. Can be made and refrigerated up to a week in advance.

4 Thai chilies or 1 Fresno pepper, stemmed and minced
1 2-inch piece fresh ginger, peeled and minced
1 minced garlic clove
2 tsp. finely grated lime zest
2 Tbsp. fresh lime juice
1 Tbsp. soy sauce
1 pound unsalted butter, at room temperature

1. In a medium bowl, combine chilies, ginger, garlic, lime zest, lime juice and soy sauce. Let sit 1 hour. Add butter and mix until evenly incorporated. Scrape into a storage container, cover and refrigerate until ready to use. For easy portioning, bring to room temperature. 

Read this article as it appears in the magazine.

The post Chef Jon Wipfli on How to Host a Winter Oyster Roast appeared first on Artful Living Magazine.

Photography by Brandon Werth

Andrew Zimmern is something of an enigma in the food world, shape-shifting from celebuchef to restaurateur to food critic to television personality to content creator to culinary teacher to children’s author. But long before the 57-year-old was eating giraffe weevil on Bizarre Foods or combatting the controversy surrounding the opening of Lucky Cricket, he was facing a different kind of battle: one against his inner demons and his addictions. In a terribly and wonderfully candid interview, he spoke about the trauma that set it all off, the time he tried to drink himself to death, the constant work he does to stay sober even today and everything in between.

On his childhood:

“I was raised in New York City in a privileged surrounding by most conventional standards. My parents had divorced but were best friends. I had a lot of healthy role modeling. But I never felt comfortable in my own skin. Even as a little kid, I remember never feeling like I really fit in. 

When I was 13 and was away at sleepaway camp in Maine the summer of ’74, I tried smoking pot. I had tried booze a bunch of times — stealing sips out of my dad’s drinks, drinking with my cousins on holidays. When I tried smoking pot, I didn’t have any euphoric feeling at the time, but I knew I was onto something.”

On what sparked his early addictions: 

“When I returned to New York City in August of ’74, my father picked me up at the airport, and we drove to the hospital. My mother was in a coma for several months as the result of a misstep in surgery; she had been given the wrong anesthesia, which cut off the oxygen supply to her brain. She had suffered some severe brain damage. 

At 13, I walked into this room and saw my mom in a plastic oxygen tent. It was an extremely traumatic event in my life, one that has affected me greatly up until even a couple years ago, when I started doing some serious trauma-related work.

But my dad was of the Greatest Generation. He was in the navy in World War II and helped build a business in New York City. We were going to deal with this by having a good cry now then maintaining a stiff upper lip — life goes on. He did the best he could, but in retrospect, it wasn’t enough.

I found myself in the Upper East Side apartment where my mother and I had been living with a nanny and a housekeeper, and my father returned to his apartment downtown. And I very quickly became overwhelmed with the myriad feelings and situational changes. I was also overwhelmed by the outpouring of grief and compassion from family and friends. The tragedy just grew to really titanic proportions in my head. I certainly didn’t want to be feeling what I was feeling. 

Now, this was in 1974; times were different. We had a family charge at the drugstore on the corner. We had a wad of cash in the silverware drawer for emergencies. There was a charge at the liquor store. There was a fully stocked bar. I had friends who had friends who sold weed and other drugs. So I started drinking and smoking pot regularly. And it was at that time that I felt that euphoric sense of relief.

I had found my coping mechanism. I felt like I had armor on. If the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail, and my tool was drugs and alcohol. So that became my way of living.”

On his addictions spiraling out of control:

“I very quickly started doing pills, cocaine, hallucinogens. By the time I went to college, I had already experimented with heroin. So when I got to college, the gloves came off, and I became a typical New York garbage head. Whatever was around was my drug of choice. I liked to mix things that brought me up with things that brought me down so that I could use all day long, whether that was narcotics, sedatives, opioids mixed with cocaine. I was functional, which gave me the false illusion that it was manageable. But things just continued to get worse and worse.

I had several required leaves from school. The third week of my freshman year, I woke up in a hospital room. I wasn’t used to the heavy drinking of the college scene, so the technical reason for my hospitalization was alcohol poisoning, but in reality, I was on a massive cocktail of lots of things. I was released from the hospital, there was a campus police report, and I was required to go for a drug and alcohol assessment.

I took a bunch of tests, and the counselor, a gentleman named D.B. Brown — I’ve never forgotten him — talked to me for an hour. He told me that on the Jellinek Curve, which is one of the tools that measures if you are an addict or an alcoholic, I was already at a chronic level. At 18.

I told him to go screw himself. I was 18 and in college. I felt like I was Superman. This wasn’t a problem; this was a situation. During my blowouts at school when I was required to take semesters off, I would go cook in Europe. I did pretty well. And I found an industry where a lot of people with my issues were comfortable, sort of hiding out in a sense.

One of the many characteristics of alcoholism and drug addiction is hyper-responsibility versus hyper-irresponsibility. In my case, I could show up to work and kick ass because I was so competitive. Then at night, I’d go out to these underground clubs or to someone’s house where we’d just get high all night long then go to work the next day and function beautifully. But there would be newspapers sitting around my house that were a year old. There were bills that were just left unpaid. Somehow I managed to sort of walk between the raindrops during college and ended up graduating.”

On how it all came undone:

“I had made a bit of a name for myself as a talented young culinary in New York City and had a series of fantastic jobs. I chefed in restaurants, general managed restaurants, helped start a bunch of restaurants, even worked for the city’s top public-relations guy for six months to learn that side of it. My goal was to have my own restaurant group at some point. 

Along the way, although my work life was going great, my alcoholism and drug addiction were dragging me down the other way. Ultimately, the addiction always wins out. And in 1990, everything came undone.

I stopped being the funny guy at the party and started being the scary guy at the party. I would get calls the next day and instead of hearing things like, ‘Oh my God, we got so drunk. You were so hysterical,’ it was, ‘Dude, that was really awful. That really scared me. I’ve never seen you that aggressive or violent before.’

By that point, I was leading quite a triple life. I had my professional life during the day. I had my life with my friends that I was desperately trying to hold onto. Then I had my secret after-three-in-the-morning life. First you’re out with your friends. You go out to a show; you go to a bar. But then everyone has had enough and goes home. That’s when I would go to the underground hellholes where people who can’t stop, who’ve lost the power of choice, who’ve lost control, who’ve lost manageability wind up. And all of that caught up with me.”

On his year of homelessness:

“By December 1990/January 1991, I was evicted from my apartment. I had no one to call, no one’s couch to crash on. Everyone had had enough. So after I got evicted, I put a bunch of my stuff in storage with the last of my money then went to the Blarney Stone and started drinking with the same drunks who were always there at two in the morning. They asked me what was new, and I told them I didn’t have a place to live. They told me to go talk to Bobby.

Now Bobby was part of a bottle gang. When the Blarney Stone would close for a couple of hours, people would buy a bottle at the all-night liquor store and drink in the alley around the corner. Bottle gangs were fairly prevalent then, and they still are. He told me, ‘We have a building down on Sullivan Street in Lower Manhattan.’ 

So that night I took my duffel bag with some clothes and some of my possessions and slept in this abandoned building on Sullivan Street. It was a townhouse that was in the midst of being renovated. Work had stopped. Actually, demolition is more like it; renovation is a little too fancy a term. There were concrete casements in the windows. There was electricity that had been pirated from a nearby building across the roof with extension cords. And there was a sink with running water, so you could drink water. Thus began my year of homelessness.

I didn’t shower for a year. Every night, I slept on a pile of dirty clothes on the floor that I called my bed. I didn’t really sleep; it was more like passing out. Every couple days, I would steal a bottle of Comet cleanser that I would pour in a circle around my sleeping area so rats and roaches wouldn’t crawl over me in the middle of the night.

And I thought that was OK and normal. That’s how bad it was. And I just kept falling further and further down. I would steal purses off the backs of chairs in bistros on the Upper East Side and bring them downtown to drug dealers to sell the credit cards and passports for money. That was my life.”

On the time he tried to drink himself to death:

“There were winners and losers in life, and clearly I had lost the game of life. I convinced myself that the easiest way to deal with the guilt, the shame, the unaddressed trauma going back to my childhood would be to drink until my body broke down.

So I stole some jewelry from my godmother, hawked it, got a little pile of cash and checked into this hotel called the San Pedro, a grade above a flophouse. I then went across the street to the liquor store to buy a couple cases of — I’ll never forget it, Popov vodka had come out in plastic bottles and I remember asking for a third case just because it would be light enough to carry upstairs. I never actually broke into the third case. I started drinking around the clock and blacking out. 

I couldn’t tell you whether it was three or five days later, but I woke up one morning and the tension, the Ace bandage that had been tied so tightly around my entire life just wasn’t there. I felt a desperate need to reach out to someone. I called my friend Clark, who was shocked to hear from me. He came down and got me out of there. Unbeknownst to me, he was already planning my intervention.”

On his intervention:

“I walked into my intervention the afternoon of January 28, 1992. Some people wanted to say some stuff to me. I had a choice and a plane ticket to Minnesota. And everybody wanted me to get on that plane and go get help.

It wasn’t until several weeks later that I saw it for what it really was. The most caring and compassionate thing that you can do for another human being is sprinkle them with dignity and respect, and show them that you love them. That’s what human beings need to get well. It was an incredible act of profound kindness. At the time, I was so emotionally beaten down, I just couldn’t stop crying. All the quit had left me. I had always been fighting everything my whole life. One of the hallmarks of recovery is that at some point, you have to bottom out, and I really bottomed out that day.

The day before that, Clark had asked me, ‘What are you going to do?’ And I said, ‘Well, if you just lend me a little money, I could get this job. I’ll go to this meeting. I’ll see this doctor.’ And I was hustling and shucking and jiving and lying. And just 24 hours later, walking into that room, I realized I didn’t want to live the way I had been living.

My parents, teachers, doctors, friends, friends’ parents, lawyers, shrinks and eventually judges — everyone had been telling me the same thing for almost 20 years: You need to stop drinking and drugging, and start addressing these things in your life — and I am here to help you. People want to help other people. That’s how we’re hardwired as human beings. I had thousands of life jackets thrown to me while I was drowning, and I just kept throwing them back in the boat. That night, I put on the life jacket, and I wound up at what is now Hazelden Betty Ford up in Center City.”

 On getting treatment at Hazelden:

“I spent five weeks at Hazelden. The first couple days, I was on the medical board while they detoxed me and made sure I was physically safe enough to go to a unit. When I got down to my unit, I was so ready to be done with this phase of my life that I just said yes to everything. I attended every group. I attended every lecture.

And I found myself with a solution put in front of me very quickly: the 12-step program. Everything in the literature, everything people were telling me was that my success really hinged on a relationship with something bigger than myself. It could be the great spirit, it could be a tree, it could be the ocean. It’s not a religious program; it’s a spiritual program. And one thing everyone had in common was that they had stopped living their life on a me-me-me basis and started living in an other-centered fashion.

My whole life, I thought there was nothing bigger than me, which was pointed out to me many times during those first couple weeks in treatment. All I had to do was look at my own story. My best thinking and acting had gotten me to this horrific place in my life where I had bottomed out, crashed, almost died — and wanted to die. 

I could admit I had a problem and that my life was unmanageable, but the idea that something other than me was going to help me get well was like Greek mythology. I just didn’t feel like there was any way I could achieve that. You’re just really waiting for this grand gesture, this big-picture, white-light, burning-bush thing to happen to you. 

Much more commonly, though, you have an experience as the result of doing the work that’s laid in front of you, especially early on. You have a spiritual experience that’s more of what the great Dr. William Silkworth called a learned experience. And I was like, ‘I’m a good learner. Maybe I can get this. Maybe this will happen for me.’ That really set me on my course for staying clean and sober now for a long time.

I had heard for several weeks from different speakers how important it was to get a sponsor early on. So I asked one of the speakers if he would sponsor me. He gave me his number and told me, ‘Call me when you get down to the Twin Cities, if that’s where you wind up.’ My relationship with him is now 27 years old.”

On living in a halfway house:

“When I left Hazelden, the recommendation was four to six months in a halfway house they run called Fellowship Club on West Seventh Street in St. Paul. I had nowhere else to go. I had no other plan. I had no other opportunity. I had nothing. So my answer to anything anybody told me was yes. 

One requirement of the house was that you got a job right away. So I spent a day writing this business plan about remaking the food program at the halfway house and presented it to the director. And I got laughed out of the office. They told me, ‘Go get a regular job, something that’s nine-to-five that you can leave behind so you can focus on your sobriety.’

Ultimately, if you don’t get a job, they find one for you, because it’s a requirement for staying in the house. There were a lot of construction and cleanup companies that knew there was a reliable source of labor in certain pockets around the Twin Cities, like our halfway house. So on the third or fourth day, I wound up cleaning toilets at a hospital. So there was a lot of motivation the next day to get a different job. I then went to every food-service establishment I could walk to or could take a short bus ride to, and I found a job washing dishes at a diner on Snelling Avenue that’s no longer there — Dubin’s.

Then I applied for a dishwasher job in a restaurant that some people I knew from New York City were opening. The French partners who own the Theater District restaurant Café Un Deux Trois opened one in the Foshay Tower in the spring of ’92. Some people I knew in the recovery community got jobs there as waiters, and I applied to be the dishwasher. And I just transferred my awesome dishwashing skill set from Dubin’s to Café Un Deux Trois.”

On the importance of halfway houses:

“Some people need to be rehabilitated. I needed to be habilitated. I needed to learn how to live. I had my dishwasher job. I was going to meetings. I started having moments where I was extremely joyous. But I was in a safe and protected place to take the baby steps I needed to take.

That’s why halfway houses and transitional housing that supports people with mental-health issues are so important to me. Because you need to let people who are really sick or who have been traumatized have a safe place to take those baby steps and get well. 

Today I’m on the boards of some important organizations that help a lot of people in this country. And I try to make a difference in the lives of people with whom I can share my experience. It doesn’t matter if someone is a homeless veteran. I’m not a veteran, but I’ve been homeless, and I know what that trauma feels like.”

On the time he almost relapsed:

“I remember one night two, three months sober, being in a car with some guys coming home from a meeting, and they were looking to buy cigarettes. In those days, there were machines in bars, and some bars sold them from behind the counter. So they stopped outside this bar, and I told them I was staying in the car. I remember I was the only one in the back seat. There were two guys in the front seats, and they got out and walked into the bar. They were probably back in two minutes with their smokes. 

And I sat there staring at that bar. I just kept saying, ‘Stay in the car. Stay in the car. Stay in the car.’ Because I knew if I got out of the car, I was going to drink. It was just staring me right in the face. I couldn’t go in. It really speaks to the idea of, ‘What is my reason for being here?’ Because at that point, I was working as a dishwasher in a restaurant that had a full bar, but I never felt like drinking there. You never know when you’re going to be challenged. But if you have a good reason and you have a plan, you can get through those early stages.”

On maintaining his sobriety:

“Quite frankly, my experience has been that if you are taking your medicine, you don’t get sick. And the recommendation of millions of people with more experience than me was, ‘Don’t drink. Go to meetings. Do the work.’ It’s almost like the kindergarten rules that I had ignored as a child. But once I started paying attention to those, it was like all of a sudden I had been jolted with electricity. 

And then in a healthy way — and I mean this in the healthiest way possible — you become so attached to other ways of making yourself feel good. I devote 25% of my time and probably just as much of my money to doing things for other people. I would love to say that I do it solely because I want to be helpful to other people, but I do it because it’s the recipe for success in my life. When I’m doing service work, I’m taking my medicine that makes maintaining my sobriety almost no work at all. Now, that’s after a long time. But I’m still active. I still regularly attend 12-step meetings. I still do all of it. It’s changed over time, but that’s very typical with sobriety in my experience.”

On how his addictions sit at bay inside him:

“Drinking, drugging and all these -isms are progressive diseases. They lead to jail, institutionalization or death. They never get better. They never go away for the real addict. They’re always with you. They may be dormant; they may stabilize for awhile. They give the false illusion of being manageable and make you think you’re fine. But it’s a progressive disease.

I believe we are all just an arm’s length away from that next drink or drug. My disease has not gone away; it’s just dormant inside me. I have to remind myself that my disease is just in there exercising and doing pushups, waiting for me to stop doing the things that keep me well. But I also know that as long as I keep doing the things that keep me well, I’m going to stay well.”

On addiction in the hospitality industry:

“I’ve seen studies that put the hospitality industry at No. 1 or No. 2 in substance-abuse rates across all sectors of employment. I think that’s for a lot of reasons, but first, there are a lot of transient workers. Everyone always thinks we’re talking about fancy restaurants, but this is across all of the hospitality industry. So you’re talking about some of the lowest paying jobs in America. The hospitality industry is also the No. 1 or No. 2 employer of single parents and the No. 1 employer of people transitioning out of jails and institutions. So the population that you’re selecting from is one issue. 

But I think the more important piece of it, at least in my experience, is that these are environments where you can hide out. If you want to hide out, you can find a place in the restaurant business. For generations, our industry has been plagued with -isms: alcoholism, drug addiction, toxic masculinity, emotionally abusive environments. Restaurants have had to do a lot of work over the past 10 years and are still doing a lot of work to clean themselves up. 

By the same token, there are very positive things about the hospitality industry: the sense of family, the bonds that are created through this intense kind of work. That has rescued a lot of people, which is my story. Restaurants rescued me and gave me my life back.

But it’s that same competitive, emotionally abusive environment. It’s that same intense combat arena. Whether it’s cleaning rooms in a hotel or peeling potatoes in a restaurant, there are four people doing that job. And the person who’s the slowest is not going to have a job the next week. It’s a meritocracy oftentimes managed by people who have no idea how to manage a meritocracy.”

On addiction as a public health crisis:

“As a society, we have a choice: Do we want to take care of everyone? Do we believe that everyone should have the same fair start? Do we believe that everyone deserves the same grace, dignity and respect? As the late great Senator Paul Wellstone once said, ‘We all do better when we all do better.’ 

The idea that someone else is going to fix this problem doesn’t work. Because alcoholism, chemical dependency and all the other -isms touch every single family in America. There’s not a family in America that’s immune to these -isms. This is a national mental-health crisis because of all the dollars that flow through our healthcare system and how much of the mental-health parity laws are yet to be equalized. If you break your leg, you can go to the hospital and get it taken care of. If you have a mental-health issue, good luck.

Until we solve that problem, we are all responsible for a massive public health crisis that I believe we are living in right now and are largely ignoring. Healthcare costs in this country are soaring. And there’s a significant amount of those healthcare costs that we as taxpayers are paying for that is a direct result of mental-health issues like alcoholism and drug addiction. They’re mental-health issues. They’re also physical-health issues. And we pay for it all on the back end. 

Wouldn’t it be better if we had mental-health parity laws that could help get people into the appropriate places early on? Wouldn’t it be great if we were able to provide affordable drug and alcohol treatment to everyone who needs it? 

I think it’s shameful. Actually, it’s beyond shameful. It’s criminal. And I’m choosing my words carefully here. I don’t think it’s too dramatic to say that ignoring our fellow Americans in need and watching them die when they could have been helped is its own form of genocide. I think ignoring these crises in our country is bordering on criminal at this point.”

On the opioid epidemic:

“The Big Pharma financial stranglehold is a big part of the problem. You have drug dealers with diplomas on the wall in white lab coats with stethoscopes around their necks.

As a sober person, I’ve had medical situations that have required me to take painkillers. I had a really horrific burn on my hand about 18 years ago. And the first thing they did in the ambulance was throw a painkiller down my throat. Then, I get out of the hospital 12 hours later, and the doctor writes me a prescription for 24 codeine pills and says, ‘This is good for six days, and you’ve got three refills.’

Thankfully I had a plan. You always have to have a plan. I said, ‘First of all, get rid of the refills. I’ll take six pills. If I need more, we’ll call you.’ Then I handed the bottle to my wife. Because who knows what my brain is going to tell me when I’m in pain in the middle of the night? Shit, I’ll take two and snort two more. We have gotten to the point where people are being overprescribed drugs that are much stronger than they need. It’s pretty bad.”

On Anthony Bourdain’s suicide:

“I was in Philadelphia. It was a Friday morning. We had been out really late shooting Thursday night, so we had an 11 o’clock start. We’d been doing nine, 10 long days in a row, so I decided to sleep in. I set my alarm and turned off my phone ringer for the night. 

My alarm went off and I grabbed my phone to turn it off, and I almost vomited because I had maybe 80 missed calls and 220 texts. I just had never seen anything like that before. And that could only mean one thing: Something horrible had happened to my child, and the whole world was trying to get ahold of me. 

But then when I tapped my phone, I saw a news notification with Tony’s name. Then I tapped my messages, and it was every food writer I knew, every culinarian, every mutual friend. I was stunned, absolutely stunned. 

I started to read some of the notes, and I started to cry. I called my crew and said, ‘We’re not going to work today at 11. I need some time.’ It was just an awful, awful, awful day. It wasn’t until many hours later that the shock… because your first… this is someone you know. He’s your friend. There’s stuff to do, people to call. Then as the day went on, we were reminded what a symphonic presence he had and how culturally important he was to so many people. And the shock — I still can’t believe he’s not with us.

On the insidious nature of suicide:

“Now, Tony could afford mental healthcare. But I think it just shows you how insidious so many of these mental-health issues are. Many mental-health issues have a component of their symptomology where the afflicted person’s brain tells them they don’t have a problem. With alcoholism and chemical dependency, we call it denial. But there are a lot of other mental- and physical-health issues that have a similar component. 

Several weeks after Tony’s death, we had the Aspen Food & Wine Classic. Kat Kinsman, who started an online group called Chefs With Issues, organized an awareness raiser for chefs to talk about this and to let people know if they’re struggling there are options. Several of us in the food industry who are in recovery helped facilitate that meeting. Then several weeks after that meeting, an Aspen bartender and line cook killed himself. 

When I heard about it, it made me angrier than I have been in a long time. Here we have the attention of a nation focused on the deeply sad loss of a treasured icon, and it should be the church bell around which we all go running to convene to solve this problem as best we can and to provide resources and help so that other families, other friends, other people don’t have to find themselves in this same situation. 

Unfortunately, I know a lot of people who have killed themselves. It’s not an instantaneous thought, feeling and reaction. It is something that is evil and pernicious that’s inside of you. It just underscores how much help we need to give everyone. 

Can we save everyone? No. I didn’t have to go to my intervention and get on that plane and go to Hazelden. If I hadn’t, I would have wound up dead. We’ve lost a lot of people who, when you investigate the stories of their lives and learn what was really going on, were thrown a hundred life jackets just like me and kept tossing them back. I’m especially sensitive to this because I know that if I hadn’t put on that last life jacket, I would have been one of those anonymous deaths like that bartender in Aspen. 

We have a national health crisis on our hands. Teen suicide rates are climbing at the greatest pace I believe since we’ve been recording the data. If this isn’t a clarion call for people to understand that it’s not up to somebody else to do something, that it’s up to us to do something, then I think we are dishonoring the loss of all of those people who aren’t with us anymore who should be.”

On what to do if you are facing addiction:

“I live my life very transparently for a reason: because I have to. Because we’re only as sick as our secrets. At various times in my life when I was unwell, it always revolved around secret keeping. It’s one of the first hints that you’re starting to compartmentalize and not living life on an other-centered basis. 

What I tell people is that you have to find someone to talk to. You have to somehow summon the courage to ask for help. You have to share that dark, painful thing that you never want to tell anyone. Because until you do, it will always have power over you. The reason that so many people don’t is that they feel they will be rejected, that they won’t be understood. Their secret will be out. Which is why affordable mental healthcare is so important. 

I’m oftentimes jealous of people who are very into organized religion, because there are mechanisms within that. I’m not advocating for any religion over another, but all of them have built-in mechanisms where people are in regular attendance at a church, a synagogue, a mosque and can interact with other people of faith and with faith leaders. So you can reach out and say something. You have to let somebody in. That’s the toughest thing in the world — to let that first person in.  

The other thing I tell people is that there’s not a human being who walks through life between the raindrops, who doesn’t have issues, who hasn’t done things they regret, who doesn’t carry around varying degrees of shame and trauma with them. Everyone can relate. I’ve never heard a story of someone who turned to another human being and said, ‘I’ve got this horrible thing going on in my life,’ and had the other person walk away. That’s not how human beings work. 

Even though there’s a voice in your head that says, ‘I can’t do this. I shouldn’t do this,’ you can and you should. It’s a must. Because if you’re not sharing that thing, it will continue to grow and have power over you. And eventually, that voice in your head will tell you something very dangerous.” 

Read this article as it appears in the magazine.

The post Andrew Zimmern Faces His Addictions appeared first on Artful Living Magazine.

Illustration by Anthony Peruzzo

Forty years ago, an elderly, ailing Duluth heiress was smothered in her bed with a satin pillow and her nurse bludgeoned to death with a candlestick holder on a sweeping staircase overlooking Lake Superior.

It began in the early morning hours of June 27, 1977, when an unassuming killer lurked in the tiny cemetery bordering the mansion grounds. Pacing amongst the headstones, he shivered and his hands shook, whether from the lake breeze or the nips he was sneaking from the pint of vodka in his pocket.

His mission: break into the 39-room mansion and solve his massive financial problems. But was he alone there in the dark? Did he intend to commit murder or was robbery the idea? And most importantly, who planned the crime?

These unanswered questions — along with the brutality of the attacks and the wide-ranging aftermath that includes arson, bigamy and more dead bodies — keep the buzz about this murder mystery alive today. There are books about the case, television docudramas, even a musical. Adding to the fascination: the scene of the crime, the historic Glensheen mansion, is open for public tours.

The killer’s cemetery vigil ended that night when Elisabeth Congdon, one of Minnesota’s wealthiest women, drifted off to sleep and the night nurse turned off the lights. Around 2 a.m., he stumbled onward.

His name was Roger Caldwell, and he was an out-of-work salesman from Golden, Colorado. Two years earlier, he’d married Marjorie LeRoy, a middle-aged divorcée with seven children. Roger later claimed he didn’t realize it when they met, but Marjorie wasn’t your typical Minnesota transplant. She was Marjorie Congdon, one of the Duluth Congdons, granddaughter of Chester, the mining magnate who made a fortune in iron ore, served in the legislature and built the mansion on the lake at the turn of the 20th century.

Chester’s youngest daughter, Elisabeth had never married. In the 1930s, she adopted two infants and raised them in the grandeur of Glensheen. The girls weren’t particularly close growing up, but to please their mother, they were maids of honor in each other’s weddings. Jennifer and her husband moved to Wisconsin. Marjorie married an accountant and lived in Minneapolis. That marriage lasted 20 years before her frustrated husband, worn down by her overspending, filed for divorce.

Afterward, Marjorie moved to Colorado for a fresh start in the mountains. She met Roger in 1975 at a Parents Without Partners meeting. She was bubbly and vivacious; he was malleable and available. They soon married. To fund her outlandish spending sprees over the years, Marjorie had relied on the Bank of Mom and had even cleaned out her million-dollar trust fund. She bought extravagant clothing, dozens of boots and skates, and hundreds of matching outfits for her children for their horse shows and ice-skating competitions. She bounced checks, trusting her mother would eventually pay the bills. And she did. But now, with Elisabeth reeling from a stroke and needing around-the-clock nursing care, the Congdon trustees stepped in. No more, they said.

By the spring of 1977, the Colorado Caldwells were broke, their home foreclosed, their cars repossessed. And yet, they toured multimillion-dollar ranches, telling realtors that her mother would handle the purchase because the mountain air would help Marjorie’s youngest son, 17-year-old Ricky, with his asthma.

That June night, Marjorie’s mother slept in her bedroom up on the mansion’s second story. Across the hallway, night nurse Velma Pietila made her final checks. She was unaccustomed to the overnight shift; she’d been the head nurse for several years, working days and becoming close with the heiress. She’d retired a month earlier so she could play golf with her husband and enjoy her grandchildren. She agreed to fill in, this night only, when another nurse asked for the evening off and no replacement could be found. Her husband begged her not to go.

The next morning, day nurse Mildred Garvue arrived at Glensheen at 7 a.m. and was surprised to find the front door unlocked. After stopping to see the cook in the kitchen, she noticed her friend and fellow nurse lying askew on the window seat of the grand staircase. It didn’t register. Why, she wondered, was Velma taking a nap?

Approaching, Garvue saw that Pietila was beaten and bloody, clearly dead. Now terrorized, she rushed upstairs to find Elisabeth dead in her bed, a satin pillow covering her face. The room was disheveled, jewelry strewn on the floor and another pillow tossed to the side. She rushed back downstairs and called 911. The dispatcher stayed on the line in case the killer was still in the house.

Police arrived and searched the grounds. The culprit was gone. Their scenario: A broken window in the billiard room on the lowest level of the house was the entry point. In the dark, the killer had gone upstairs to the first floor then started up toward the bedroom level. Pietila heard him approach and confronted him on the landing. She fought and clawed but was soon overwhelmed by a larger force. She collapsed, but her moans grew louder, so he grabbed a brass candlestick holder and, as he later explained, “beat her with it to quiet her down.”

In the bedroom upstairs, he held a pillow over Elisabeth’s face; partially paralyzed, she was unable to fight back. When she stopped struggling, some five minutes later, he rummaged through a closet and a night table, putting some jewelry in a basket, taking Elisabeth’s diamond ring from her finger and a gold watch from her wrist, and snatching an ancient gold coin from a dresser.

Covered with the nurse’s blood, he washed his hands and face in the small bathroom across the hall, leaving a bloody residue but no fingerprints. He rummaged through the nurse’s purse, found her car keys and fled the mansion, leaving the door unlocked.

By late morning, with the scene secured, police gave their first official statement. The brutal double homicide, they said, occurred during a botched burglary. Some jewelry had been taken.

Three days later, relatives from around the country arrived in Duluth for Elisabeth’s funeral. Marjorie and Roger came in from Denver, and police noticed bruises and cuts on his face and hands. He’d been kicked by a horse, his wife told them.

The botched burglary scenario remained the public version of the crime for the first week, but police were already exploring a different motive. Upon hearing of the heinous murders, several Congdon family members, long aware of Marjorie’s financial woes and vindictive nature, urged police to take a close look at Elisabeth’s daughter and her new husband.

There’d been earlier scares, they reported, like the marmalade incident. At a family gathering a few years earlier, Elisabeth had become quite ill. Someone remembered that Marjorie had fed her some homemade orange marmalade. Tests showed the presence of a dangerous chemical in Elisabeth’s blood, but the marmalade jar was never found and authorities were not notified.

Now, in the wake of the murders, such details were important to the Duluth police as they dug into their biggest homicide case ever. Diligent, sometimes sloppy forensic work continued at the mansion for days. Blood and hair were cataloged, but no incriminating fingerprints were found. The lack of DNA technology in those days made the case all the more difficult for the prosecution.

Yet a trail of evidence began to emerge. There was the handwritten will, dated three days before the murders, in which Marjorie signed over to Roger a $2.5-million portion of her expected $8-million inheritance.

Then there was the fact that Roger had flown to Duluth a month earlier to ask Elisabeth and the family trustees for $750,000 to buy a ranch. At the very least, he told them, he and Marjorie needed $500,000 to pay off debts and stay out of jail. His request was refused.

Furthermore there was the envelope, addressed to Mr. Roger Caldwell, in what appeared to be his own handwriting, found in the Caldwells’ Colorado mailbox (it arrived after they’d left for the funeral). Inside was a Byzantine-era coin, like the one taken from Elisabeth’s bedroom. An expert said a thumbprint on the envelope matched Roger’s. And it had been postmarked in Duluth the day of the murders.

Hair found at the scene “closely matched” Roger’s, and some of the blood found matched his blood type.

Jewelry found in the Caldwells’ hotel room after the funeral was strikingly similar to that taken from the mansion. Upon questioning, Marjorie told police the baubles belonged to her and that she and her mother owned many identical items.

The nurse’s car was discovered at the Minneapolis–St. Paul airport the day after the murder. In a garbage can, maintenance workers found the keys and a parking ticket with a time stamp of 6:35 a.m., enough time for the killer to make the 150-mile drive from Duluth after the crime. While searching the Caldwells’ room, police found a receipt from an MSP airport gift shop for a suit bag bought the morning of the murders. Roger had such a bag. Shown a picture of him, two gift-shop workers thought he might have been the buyer.

There was no smoking gun, but chief prosecutor John DeSanto and his team felt their case was strong. Upon hearing that the Minneapolis newspaper planned to publish a story on the Colorado connection, they arrested Roger two weeks after the homicides.

Roger’s lawyers worried about getting a fair trial in Duluth, which has an indisputable Congdon legacy; there’s a Congdon Boulevard, a Congdon Park and a Congdon school. A judge agreed to move the proceedings to Brainerd.

Jury selection began in April 1978, ten months after the murders. It took more than three weeks to find 12 citizens to hear the case. Testimony started May 9 with lead investigator Sergeant Gary Waller showing gruesome pictures of the crime scene and taking jurors through the evidence.

A hole in the case arose when police couldn’t identify two handprints found in the bathroom where the killer had washed up. They didn’t match Roger’s prints, so the defense grandly argued that they belonged to the “real killer.” To clear things up, police went back to the lab to reexamine the evidence. Later in the trial, they admitted they’d solved the mystery: One print belonged to a Congdon nurse; the other was Waller’s, left in the sink early in the investigation.

Another disruption was the abrupt dismissal of a juror. Eventually it came out she’d received an unsigned letter offering $10,000 for a guilty verdict. The judge ruled that she couldn’t be fair under the circumstances. No one was ever charged with sending the letter.

Among the other quandaries: No one had seen Roger in Duluth that day, and despite extensive efforts, police couldn’t place him on any airline passenger list for flights from Denver to Minneapolis and back again (airport security wasn’t as tight back in 1977).

There was also no clear explanation as to why Roger would mail himself the stolen gold coin. He had returned to Denver long before it arrived, so it seemed unlikely to be a message to Marjorie that the deed was done. The defense claimed the envelope was part of an elaborate frame-up.

The nurse’s stolen car was a quagmire. Pietila was filling in that night and left her car by the front door, but other night nurses didn’t always drive to work. The killer apparently found her keys and drove her car to the airport. Wouldn’t someone planning a murder have a better getaway plan?

And in a theatrical ploy, the defense demonstrated that Roger’s arm wouldn’t have fit through the shards of glass in the broken basement window that the killer used for entry. Employing a cardboard mockup of the window, Roger’s attorney had a testifying police officer reach through as if to unlatch a lock on the other side. The officer’s arm, which was thinner than Roger’s, couldn’t fit through the opening without dislodging simulated glass fragments.

Roger didn’t testify during his trial. After eight weeks of testimony, more than 500 pieces of evidence and 109 witnesses, the jurors got the case. They deliberated for two and a half days before declaring him guilty of both murders. Roger was sentenced to two consecutive life terms in prison, with a minimum of 35 years behind bars. But in another twist, he would serve far, far less time.

Roger’s conviction gave DeSanto and the prosecution team the confidence to go further. The day after his sentencing, they charged Marjorie with planning the murders.

It was a circumstantial case of conspiracy. No one alleged that she had physically committed the murders, as many witnesses had seen her in Colorado, more than 800 miles away. But, the theory went, Roger would not have undertaken the crime on his own. He didn’t know his way around Duluth or the mansion. He lacked ambition, he was easily persuaded and he liked to drink. And in the hours and days after the murders, Marjorie had given inconsistent statements as to why Roger was not seen in Colorado during the crucial time period.

Marjorie hired Minneapolis attorney Ron Meshbesher, the top defense lawyer in the region who was well-known for some highly publicized acquittals. He had the advantage of knowing exactly what evidence the prosecution would use against his client as he had the transcript from Roger’s trial. On top of that, he had an additional 10 months to find holes in the case that could show reasonable doubt.

Marjorie’s trial was moved to Hastings. Two major developments arose during testimony: Meshbesher found an expert who disputed the crucial fingerprint on the envelope with the stolen gold coin, the key link placing Roger in Duluth the day of the murders.

And defense investigators went back to Colorado and found a waitress who now, nearly two years after the crime, changed her story and suddenly remembered seeing Roger that day. In earlier interviews with police, she’d never mentioned his presence, but she came to Hastings and told the jury he was there.

Another major difference in the trials? Marjorie herself. She knitted at the defense table, openly smiled at jurors and kept a book nearby. She even brought a cake to the courtroom for Meshbesher’s birthday, chatting with reporters and spectators during breaks. She didn’t look like a conniving plotter.

Initially, Marjorie insisted on testifying, but she eventually agreed it would be best to remain silent. Her team instead attacked the evidence used to convict Roger. The message to the jurors: The couple had been framed, or at the very least, Roger had done it on his own.

After six weeks of testimony, the jury deliberated for 10 hours and found Marjorie not guilty. After the verdict was read, some of the jurors came forward, hugging the defendant and congratulating her.

Though disappointed and certain that the defense’s theories were false, the prosecutors consoled themselves knowing they had the actual killer in prison. But even that comfort wouldn’t last.

Based on Marjorie’s acquittal, Roger’s attorneys filed an appeal. Without the incriminating fingerprint, they were sure they would prevail in a second trial. (The Colorado waitress had by now recanted her claim of seeing Roger, but it was too late for Marjorie’s case.)

The appeal process grinded slowly ahead, and in August 1982, the Minnesota Supreme Court overturned Roger’s conviction and ordered a new trial. He was released, having served more than five years.

Back in Duluth, authorities were in a bind. A new trial, after all those years, would be problematic. In addition to the new evidence from Marjorie’s trial, witnesses had died. Plus the cost of a second trial would be huge. They worried that if they lost — and Roger walked free — the city’s biggest murder case would remain unsolved.

They proposed a plea bargain. If Roger would confess, they’d offer him a much shorter sentence: just one additional year in prison.

Roger, by now living in his hometown of Latrobe, Pennsylvania, held out for better terms. Negotiations led to a new deal: guilty pleas in return for no further prison time. With that promise in hand, he quickly agreed.

Roger returned to Duluth and confessed in court, saying he’d waited outside the mansion that night, broken in and killed the women. He was drinking heavily, he said, and couldn’t remember crucial details, like how he’d flown to and from Minnesota without detection. He didn’t remember taking the gold coin from the bedroom. He showed no remorse. There was no mention of an accomplice.

His intent, he claimed, was burglary, not homicide. And he insisted there was no getaway scheme: “I didn’t have any plan,” he said in the confession. “I didn’t — this was the most amateurish, slipshod thing, now that I’ve had years to ponder it.” And even though Marjorie was legally in the clear thanks to double-jeopardy rules, Roger denied that she had any involvement or knowledge of the crime.

Free and back in Pennsylvania, Roger fared poorly. He was obese, alcoholic and on welfare. He received $186 a month, lived above a bar and wore clothes from the Salvation Army.

At one point, he contacted the Congdons with a proposal that, if they paid him handsomely, he’d provide evidence showing that others were involved in the murders. Reluctantly, the family agreed to a sum of $50,000 but asked for proof that the evidence was sound. Roger refused and raised the price to $100,000. Negotiations broke off.

In 1988, Roger slit his wrists with a steak knife. He was 54. I was one of nine people at his funeral. Near his body, police found a suicide note, in which he claimed he “didn’t kill those girls or to my knowled [sic] ever harm a soul in my life.”

Was this deathbed disclosure truthful? Turns out Roger had a girlfriend in Latrobe, but she hadn’t attended his funeral because she was in the hospital with a broken collarbone after being badly beaten. So, in fact, he could harm a soul, particularly when drunk. The note was a lie.

When Marjorie was acquitted of plotting to kill her mother, many felt she had escaped justice using a clever lawyer and taking advantage of police mistakes. But eventually, she paid a price for other misdeeds.

Marjorie visited Roger only once while he was in prison. And in 1981, she married a man named Wally Hagen in a North Dakota civil ceremony — without first divorcing Roger. Authorities filed bigamy charges against her, but because it’s not an extraditable crime, she was never arrested. Wally and Helen Hagen had known Marjorie since the 1960s, when their children performed together in ice-skating competitions. They were among the few friends who remained in touch with her. After Marjorie’s acquittal, Helen was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and placed in a nursing home. She lapsed into an unexplained coma days after arriving; nurses reported that the last person to visit her was Marjorie. Three days later, Helen died. Marjorie and Wally were soon inseparable.

After their wedding, a house they had just sold in the Twin Cities was set on fire the night they moved out. Marjorie, who still owed money on the mortgage, was charged with arson. Investigators uncovered a series of unexplained fires in her background, going back to her youth. Again, Ron Meshbesher defended her. This time, they lost. She was convicted of arson and insurance fraud, and sentenced to time at the Shakopee women’s prison.

When she was released some 20 months later, she and Wally moved to the Southwest in an RV, eventually settling in tiny Ajo, Arizona, not far from the Mexican border. Wally had cancer, Marjorie told neighbors, so the couple often went to Mexico to buy his cancer drugs. It wasn’t long before a series of fires occurred in empty homes and garages across the former copper-mining town. Police suspected juveniles.

The Hagens feuded with a next-door neighbor, claiming he threw garbage into their yard and agitated their dog. One night, the neighbor, a border-patrol officer, heard a fuss at his window and found a kerosene-soaked rag on the sill. He called police, who set a trap, hoping to catch the culprit. Around 1 a.m., they saw a flash and rushed out, chasing a figure down a dark alley. It was Marjorie.

She was charged with arson once again. She was jailed for eight months, unable to make bail. Wally, who’d been confined to a wheelchair, seemed to improve while she was gone. He was alert and drove around town, visiting restaurants and flirting with women. But when Marjorie was released, pending trial, Wally’s health deteriorated again. A neighbor said she was giving him pills to sleep.

Wally testified at her arson trial, arriving in the Tucson courtroom on a gurney. He said Marjorie’s arthritis was so bad she couldn’t even hold a match. Jurors later saw him walking by himself in the parking lot.

She was convicted of the attempted arson and would later plead no-contest to other arson charges. The stiff sentence: 15 years in prison, three times longer than Roger had spent behind bars after being found guilty of two murders.

At Marjorie’s sentencing, she asked the judge for one more day of freedom to take care of Wally. The judge agreed, but police suspected she might flee to Mexico. They followed her back to Ajo and sent regular patrols by the house.

The next day, an officer smelled natural gas coming from the house. He knocked. Marjorie said all was fine, that the pilot light had blown out on her stove. A few hours later, she called friends to tell them Wally was dead.

Police found a piece of hose, cut just long enough to reach from the oven to the bedroom. Prescription pills lay near Wally’s body, along with a double suicide note, saying that she’d been unjustly accused and didn’t want to go to prison and that Wally’s health meant that he couldn’t live without her. They wished to be buried together, in one casket, along with their dog. “As we have only the three of us in life, we wish to have the three of ourselves together in death,” she’d written.

Marjorie was arrested for murder. But as the deadline for calling a grand jury neared, prosecutors questioned if their evidence would hold up in court. Maybe it had been a planned double suicide; he’d gone first then she balked. The charge was dropped.

Wally’s three children wanted their father’s body returned to Minnesota to be buried next to their mother. Marjorie, from her prison cell, refused to release it. After a long, costly legal battle, a judge granted the children half his ashes; Marjorie got the other half. That’s when the Hagen family publicly wondered if she had been involved in their mother’s death, too.

Two of Wally’s children attended a 2001 parole board hearing in Phoenix, where Marjorie, clad in a bright orange jumpsuit, was seeking early release. She took no responsibility for her actions and ranted to the board about how the Hagen children and I had caused her much trouble over the years. Several of her children had written letters to the board opposing early release. The ruling: no early parole.

In 2004, having served a decade in prison, Marjorie moved to Tucson. Shortly after her release, her lawyer, Ed Bolding, called me to say she was broke and wanted to write a book to make big money. Would I help? No, I explained. There wouldn’t be any big money or even a book deal if she wasn’t more forthcoming about her role in the murders. I also mentioned it was probably not a good idea to go into business with Marjorie.

Within a year, I learned that Marjorie had accused that attorney of stealing her money while she was in prison. Court records show that she receives about $4,800 a month from the Congdon estate and Wally’s pension, so there should have been a large accumulation waiting for her upon release.

I scoffed at the idea that someone had scammed Marjorie; throughout her life, it’s always been Marjorie who’s done the scamming. But I was wrong. Bolding was convicted of embezzling $1 million from her and another client.

In 2007, Marjorie befriended a man named Roger Sammis in an assisted-living home and offered to help with his finances. He soon died, but she kept writing checks — to herself. Police tried to determine his cause of death but learned that Marjorie had used her power of attorney to have him cremated. She was charged with fraud and forgery, and sentenced to intensive probation.

Three years later, Marjorie went to court to try to get out of her probation so she could move into an assisted-living facility. The judge denied her request.

Marjorie turns 85 this July. She still lives in Tucson.

Joe Kimball first reported on the Glensheen murders back in the seventies as a rookie reporter for the Minneapolis Tribune. He is the author of the bestselling book Secrets of the Congdon Mansion.

Read this article as it appears in the magazine.

The post A Retelling of Minnesota’s Infamous Glensheen Murders appeared first on Artful Living Magazine.

In Paris in July, as the most recent round of haute couture collections was unveiled, that surrealism was amplified. Real life and pure fashion fairy tale felt simultaneously further apart and more enmeshed than ever.

Because there, as dresses priced at hundreds of thousands of dollars were presented to the 1% of the 1% in gilded salons and capacious show spaces, the real world felt closer than ever. A little context refresher: In Ukraine, the Russian invasion raged on. In the United States, Roe v. Wade had been overturned just days earlier. In France, the previous month’s legislative elections saw President Emmanuel Macron lose control of the National Assembly and revealed a polarized public. Across the Channel, once bulletproof British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who had somehow survived scandal after scandal, finally surrendered. (A stark example of the collision of my two worlds: I had the BBC live stream on silent on my phone during one show, eagerly awaiting his resignation speech). On top of that, it was a summer of strikes and catastrophic acts of nature.

To say we live in volatile, terrifying times is an understatement. Local and global politics feel very much like everybody’s business. They always have been, of course, but this is the first time in many of our lifetimes that we’ve witnessed the precarity of supposedly sacrosanct, stable systems and the impact that a few can have on the many. 

Putting it clumsily: Politics is everywhere. Putting it bluntly: It’s in. So too, by definition, is fashion. It begs the question: What role does politics play in fashion, and vice versa? Can designers and brands make meaningful political statements? And in our ordinary lives, how much of what we wear is ruled by political motivation? In short, is fashion political? And if it is, should it be?

It’s important to establish what we mean when we say “politics.” There is the official dictionary definition, which pertains to government and legislature, constitutions and elections. But there’s also what I think of as the casual lower-case interpretation, which is broader and less tangible. It encompasses everything from the boardroom (office politics) to the bedroom (sexual politics). Both definitions are about not just asserting our beliefs, but ourselves. And isn’t fashion too about asserting our private selves in a very public way?

Illustration by Labyrinth of Collages

The most obviously political show of the fall/winter 2022 collections (which were presented in early 2022, available in stores now) was also one of the most personal. Taking place the week following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Balenciaga show was held in a giant snow globe, originally conceived as a commentary on climate change. Models trudged across a windy tundra, some of them dragging XXL bags as if they’d been hastily usurped from their homes. It felt apocalyptic and horrifyingly familiar. The parallels between what was occurring on stage and what was unfolding in real time on the same continent were alarming.

For creative director Demna, this wail about the state of the world was also poignantly particular. On each attendee’s seat was a T-shirt in the colors of the Ukrainian flag and a note from the designer explaining how the war had “triggered the pain of a past trauma” when, at age 10, he and his family were forced to flee their home country of Georgia. That, he wrote, was when “I became a forever refugee. Forever, because that’s something that stays in you.”

“In a time like this, fashion loses its relevance and its actual right to exist,” his note continued. “Fashion Week feels like some kind of an absurdity. I thought for a moment about canceling the show that I and my team worked hard on and were all looking forward to. But then I realized that canceling this show would mean giving in, surrendering to the evil that has already hurt me so much for almost 30 years. I decided that I can no longer sacrifice parts of me to that senseless, heartless war of ego.” In merging the global and intimate, Demna produced one of the season’s most moving, most lauded collections.

Demna’s Balenciaga show was dedicated “to fearlessness, to resistance, and to the victory of love and peace.” Those sentiments are echoed by Ukrainian designers still living and working there. For them, their work, their business, their very existence is now inextricable from politics.

At home in Kyiv, designer Ivan Frolov was awoken by the sound of explosions the morning of February 24. For the safety of his team, he stopped production immediately. “We were OK with any decision employees made, either staying in Kyiv — half of which did — or moving to other places where they felt safer,” he tells me. After a month, however, something strange happened: “We got used to living with constant sirens and running to a bomb shelter,” he says. “Our team who stayed in Kyiv decided to come back to production and started sewing the unloadings for the vests and rocket carriers for the Ukrainian army. We also transferred some of our sewing machines to another volunteer bulletproof vest production site.” Later, he launched Frolov Heart, a charitable initiative supporting the Masha Foundation’s efforts to help children who have lost their parents.

But for Frolov, who has continued to produce his daring after-dark collections, creation is itself a political act: “From my perspective, fashion does matter as it gives people hope and it can be a powerful platform for change. We’re using it to create, which is the antidote to what our enemies do; they destroy.”

To design is one thing, to shop is another. But according to Katimo’s Katya Timoshenko, whose spring/summer 2022 collection was created in Kyiv “under the sounds of air raid sirens,” that’s exactly what people are doing. 

For her, there’s something innately political not just about Ukrainians designing and making clothes, but about buying, wearing and, yes, even enjoying them. When Timoshenko reopened the Katimo store in April, women immediately came in and bought dresses. She was surprised: Why would someone want to buy a new dress when air raid alerts were sounding every few hours?

“I realized that buying a new dress in such a difficult period is a search for support; it’s a life-affirming action that makes you feel alive,” she explains. One customer placed an online order to her home in Kyiv. Even though she was abroad, knowing that a sleek yellow dress would be waiting for her gave her something priceless: hope. “And here, obviously, it’s not about a simple possession,” notes Timoshenko. “It’s much more than buying new clothes.”

Fashion has always been about much more than clothes, but the scale of the industry’s reaction to the war in Ukraine has been unprecedently immense and united. There have been creative responses, like Dior’s Maria Grazia Chiuri collaborating with Ukrainian artist Olesia Trofymenko for her fall/winter 2022 couture collection. The tree of life, a cross-cultural emblem of harmony and circularity, was the starting point.

And when those pieces, with their extravagant folkloric embroidery, appear on red carpets and at galas, won’t they be so much more than just clothes? Won’t they also be gestures of solidarity? It’s worth noting, too, that Christian Dior — whose work Grazia Chiuri is always respectful to — founded his house in the aftermath of World War II. His response? The radical New Look, which spelled not only a new optimism but the reinvigoration of a very valuable industry.

Designers, brands and prominent individuals have responded to the war with public declarations of support (often via social media, which, for good and bad, is the most easily accessible platform to show allegiance with a cause). There’s also been financial action, from fundraising to direct donations. Above all, widespread sanctioning of Russia — and the subsequent departure from the powerful market by brands ranging from Chanel to Zara — is a pertinent reminder that fashion is not just an art; it’s an industry. Money talks.

Bolstering fashion’s almost unanimous response to the war in Ukraine is a wider cultural shift, with a spirit of collaboration emerging. Look, for instance, at how enfant terrible Jean Paul Gaultier has handed over the reins of his house to guest designers (most recently, Balmain’s Olivier Rousteing), or how Marc Jacobs proudly posts his outfits, tagging the designers behind them. See Fendace, the ultra desirable partnership of what should be two rival Italian houses, Fendi and Versace (or, for that matter, Fendi’s collab with Kim Kardashian’s Skims line).

Taken with the deliberate you-can-sit-with-us spirit surging through the industry, this has a political undertone. It emphasizes community, unity and a marked move away from the partisan divisions that have marred capital P politics for the past decade.

The design duo Marques’Almeida (helmed by Portugal-based couple Marta Marques and Paulo Almeida) has always felt a duty to do more. For them, contributing to the kind of world they want their daughter to grow up in means helping nurture community. This September, they launched the Marques’Almeida Foundation, which puts independent artisans at the forefront. 

“We did some mentoring projects with young designers and artists, and that became our whole life,” Marques explains. “At this point, I think what started very instinctively halfway through our career has now become the forefront of everything we do: this whole idea of sustainability, of being active in and empowering our community and celebrating them so that people are seen. This guides everything else. If the next 10 years are centered around that, we are happy.”

Collaboration is not new, nor is it in and of itself political, but it does have a positive social impact that shouldn’t be sniffed at. This was one of the most uplifting consequences of the pandemic, when designers rallied together for a larger cause. Could it be that they found purpose in PPE, the most literal garment of all?

Let’s be cynical for a moment, however, and ponder an important question: Is this all a marketing ploy? Has activism simply become a trend? No doubt many brands have been forced to catch up with the zeitgeist, held to account by #MeToo, Black Lives Matter and the weight of social media, an ever-vigilant watchdog ready to pounce on every inappropriate or insensitive move. Now, to not speak out is to say something; silence can be costly. And while a greater sense of accountability is no doubt positive, it does beg a question of authenticity.

London-based designer Richard Malone is ferociously smart and unafraid to speak out about what he believes is right. A vocal champion of the working class, he focused on sustainability long before it became a buzzword. So does he think that brands have a duty to speak out about the causes that matter to them?

“In many cases, it can be a clear contradiction in terms,” he says with characteristic frankness. “Sincerity is something that’s extremely hard to come by in fashion, when the endgame is to profit the same people it has always profited.” For his part, Malone doesn’t believe that sharing memes or TikToks counts as meaningful action: “Real action happens from real experience and difficult conversations that happen in real life.”

In 2018, the Irish designer was crucially active in his support of repealing his home country’s Eighth Amendment, which effectively outlawed abortion (the law was repealed by a landslide in a historic referendum). When he took part in Selfridges’ Anatomy of Luxury campaign, he wrote “Repeal the Eighth” and “Women’s Rights are Human Rights” on the windows of the luxury London department store. (It was promptly removed, and Selfridges released a statement explaining it’s a “politically neutral safe space.”)

So given the fury surrounding the overturning of Roe v. Wade, does Malone think fashion can meaningfully weigh in on that discussion? “I’m not sure it can,” he confesses. “It happens so often that fashion attaches itself to a cause then the people who are actually doing the work — educators, lawmakers, charity workers — get eliminated from the conversation.” Brands that want to make a difference, he says, should take real action, like making direct financial contributions to nonprofits.

At the time of writing, a multitude of brands, from mainstream to luxury, have pledged formal action. Early on, Patagonia promised to cover bail for any of its employees arrested while protesting the Supreme Court’s decision. Gucci, Levi’s, and Capri Holdings (the luxury group presiding over Versace, Jimmy Choo and Michael Kors) are just a few of the many companies that have promised to help their employees access safe abortion care.

The times we’re living in are as economically unsettling as they are socially disconcerting. For brands, dollars mean dollars, whoever they come from. In other words, to risk alienating customers still takes guts. So, yes, it does matter when Ralph Lauren posts to its 14 million followers on Instagram: “We have always been inspired by the ideal of freedom that underlies the American dream. Everyone should have the choice to pursue the life they want to live.” And it can make a difference when Tory Burch publishes an open letter to her team stating that “I am outraged by the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, stripping women of the constitutional right to make safe, informed choices about their own bodies” (both brands also pledged formal action). Indeed, standing up for something can be both sincere and savvy; one does not void the other.

Given the tempestuous nature of today’s unrelenting news cycle, one almost feels sorry for the fashion execs trying to get it right. To run a legitimate, functioning business you must appeal to as many people as possible; but to appeal to people, you must also find a niche and hone not just an identity, but an entire language of desirability. It’s about culture building.

For some brands, society, taste and the zeitgeist have moved on faster than they have, leaving them looking like the wrong kind of throwback. Consider Victoria’s Secret. Once upon a time, the U.S. lingerie retailer’s annual show was one of the biggest events on the fashion calendar, a razzmatazz no-expense-spared bacchanal of panties and professionally sculpted bodies. Then, a series of events (#MeToo, body positivity, the unraveling of Jeffrey Epstein) converged. We all left the chat before they did.

Or look at Abercrombie & Fitch. That tan, whitened-teeth, ripped, preppy aesthetic was one of the definitive looks at the turn of the millennium. Then, murmurs of racism and sex scandals (outlined in Netflix’s White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch documentary) plus, frankly, the evolution of collective taste rendered it too irrelevant.

Both brands have done an about-face and deliberately rewritten their aesthetic language to chime with more woke times. For Victoria’s Secret, the Angels are gone and in their place are new advocates like Megan Rapinoe and Priyanka Chopra Jonas who are famous, as The New York Times puts it, “for their achievements and not their proportions.” The company has repositioned itself for the female gaze and not the male one.

Meanwhile, A&F is doubling down on diversity with a social media campaign showcasing the very people it once excluded. A statement from CEO Fran Horowitz, who’s being credited with making the heritage brand cool again, included this promise: “We’re focused on inclusivity — and continuing that transformation is our enduring promise to you, our community.” 

The sincerity of these makeovers is up to us, the buying public, to decide. But it’s starkly apparent that, despite multibillion-dollar sales figures, neither of these brands possesses the cultural clout they once did. In the time it took them to rework their mission statements, new names rose to the fore. For instance, diversity and inclusivity have always been part of the DNA of Rihanna’s Savage X Fenty lingerie line. Authentic evolution is not just about optics.

And what of the clothes that you and I wear? Most people I know would be mystified if I suggested that their sartorial choices were in any way dictated by politics. But ask them about the choices they made that morning (look at the choices you made this morning), and it’s unlikely they were governed entirely by practicality. Rather, we all communicate messages through our clothes. It’s how we express who we are, who we want to be. What we wear either unifies or separates us; fashion is our fast-track admission to our chosen communities.

Sometimes our intentions are obvious. Consider Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “Tax the Rich” Brother Vellies dress at the 2021 Met Gala or actress Natalie Portman’s Dior cape worn at the 2020 Oscars embroidered with the names of snubbed female filmmakers.

You don’t need access to bespoke designer creations to say something. Widely available T-shirts, caps and totes fulfill the same literal purpose: That’s hot! We should all be feminists! You are on Native land! These easily accessible, intentionally unremarkable pieces of apparel are “a means of communication to the masses, a walking billboard to communicate important facets of ourselves without saying a single word,” observes Kacion Mayers, editorial director of Dazed Media, which publishes Dazed & Confused, the British magazine that’s been at the forefront of youth culture since 1991.

But the meanings and messages are there, stealthily conveyed, in everything we wear. Often they’re quiet, aesthetically anonymous even, but still a nod and wink to those in the know. As Katimo’s Katya Timoshenko explains, when we buy clothes, we’re buying the “stories that stand behind these things. When I buy a new dress, not only do I want a new piece of clothing, I want to be part of the brand’s world.”

We now choose which brands to align ourselves with purposefully. And it works both ways; companies also carefully consider who they want to be affiliated with. Look at how Fred Perry withdrew its black and yellow polo shirt from sale in North America in 2020 after it was adopted by the far-right group Proud Boys. Or consider how fashion houses publicly distanced themselves from former first lady Melania Trump. (It wasn’t based on how the born clotheshorse and one-time model looked.)

It’s not only about who you don’t want wearing your clothes, but rather who you do. Today, brands are deliberately associating themselves with individuals who aren’t models or celebrities by trade, be it Proenza Schouler recruiting writer Ottessa Moshfegh to pen its fall/winter 2022 show notes or Mejuri jewelry (in collaboration with creative mastermind Jenna Lyons) casting trans actress Tommy Dorfman and journalist Noor Tagouri in its ad campaigns. Choices like this convey a clear message: We are a brand of substance as well as style.

So, no, it’s not a coincidence that Vice President Kamala Harris wore Black designers to the presidential inauguration or that actress Gemma Chan chose to celebrate designers of Asian heritage for the Crazy Rich Asians press tour. And when Beyoncé sings on this year’s tour-de-force album Renaissance that “this Telfar bag imported, Birkins, them shit’s in storage,” it’s a statement about so much more than a handbag; it’s about championing a queer Black designer. For her, Telfar’s Bushwick Birkin (available for less than $300) now trumps the clout of Hermès’s iconic handbag (which has sold for six figures). Beyoncé is vocally supporting inclusion and accessibility while asserting the authority and autonomy of Black people not only to exist in the world of luxury fashion but to shape it.

These are just a handful of examples of the public figures using clothes as shorthand for their values. “Now more than ever, what we buy represents who we are,” says Chinese-born, London-based, couture-trained designer Huishan Zhang. “Understanding how the things we own are made and what brands stand for is important to our clients.”

The red carpet has become fertile ground for political expressions. Just look at singer Harry Styles: At once alpha and camp in his feather boas and pink sequins, he’s redefining masculinity for the mainstream. It’s a pertinent commentary on gender norms. Or consider the archival Versace dress Zendaya wore to the 2021 BET Awards, a deliberate homage to Beyoncé, who wore a shorter version to the same ceremony in 2003 (with its dual sustainable and style-literate credentials, vintage is a smart move). Or recall Kim Kardashian’s ultimate assertion of A-list power: donning the controversial Marilyn Monroe dress for this year’s Met Gala (not just a dress, the dress). It was a play for icon status rather than mere celebrity. On the other end of the spectrum, we have the likes of Selena Gomez, Katie Holmes and Sienna Miller repeatedly wearing Spanish high-street giant Mango — a gesture of accessibility, semaphoring a relatable, down-to-earth quality.

Rihanna is, in my books, an expert political dresser. It doesn’t seem born out of a desire to be provocative, but rather in her complete ease in her own skin. During her pregnancy, she refused to toe the maternity muumuu line. Instead, she leaned into turbo-charged, fashion-fluent glamour with a hefty dose of sexiness, wearing everything from a sheer Dior negligee to a custom Coperni crop top. Even in 2022, this could still shock.

To see not just a woman’s body, but a pregnant woman’s body, in all its unapologetic magnificence felt important. That Rihanna is also a Black woman — a demographic so often told to know their place — is notable. With every look she said, Know my place? This is my place! Rather than fit the narrative, she rewrote it. Don’t tell me that wasn’t political.

I would argue that dressing sexy is, for women, often an intrinsically political move. A short skirt does not mean we’re “asking for it.” In the summer of 1994, Princess Diana’s black off-the-shoulder revenge dress spelled her emancipation from the royal family. In the 1970s, Diane von Furstenberg’s wrap dress became a symbol of sexual empowerment (no zips or buttons made it easier to slip out of a bedroom without waking someone). And today? We have Lizzo, who absolutely refuses to hide her beautiful body — a more powerful expression of a woman’s ownership of her own sexuality than any motivational quote could ever be.

Similarly, when actress Florence Pugh attended the Valentino haute couture show earlier this year in a gown that revealed her nipples, she received sadly predictable, entirely anticipated backlash. But guess what? She owned it and used it as an opportunity to call out the behavior. “What’s been interesting to watch and witness is just how easy it is for men to totally destroy a woman’s body, publicly, proudly, for everyone to see,” she wrote on Instagram. “I’ve lived in my body for a long time. I’m fully aware of my breast size and am not scared of it.”

Pugh’s confidence was certainly admirable, but most must rely on quieter, safer-for-work methods to make ourselves heard. I can’t imagine that any of us have much in common with Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle, yet there are lessons we can learn from how they approach fashion. The duchesses are both expert diplomatic dressers, proficient in the art of the covert sartorial statement. They re-wear pieces to assuage any accusations of Marie Antoinette–esque opulence; they dress in the colors of the countries they’re visiting; they champion homegrown designers.

Since Markle departed England for America, there have been subtle changes in her wardrobe that signify an ambition beyond her current role. To some, they indicate a desire to move into capital P politics. It might look unremarkable, but those capacious handbags and sleek folios she has carried on trips to the United Nations (despite, no doubt, having plenty of people to tote her stuff around for her) speak volumes: I am busy. I have important things to do that cannot wait.

Fashion is a dialogue, not a monologue. For many of us, it’s the easiest tool at our disposal for communicating to those around us not just how we want to look, but how we want the world to look, too. What the explicit style statements and the below-the-radar moves, the thrift shop finds and the extravagant custom gowns all remind us is that fashion indeed does matter. 

Which brings me back to July’s couture collections. Texas-born Daniel Roseberry opened the week with a dazzling Schiaparelli collection (coincidentally, the designer behind Lady Gaga’s presidential inauguration look, finished with a dove of peace brooch as a beautifully political statement). He addressed the very purpose of fashion head-on in his show notes.

“All of us who work in fashion know that much of the rest of the world thinks that what we do is silly,” he wrote. “It’s a boring criticism, and we all argue otherwise, but if you think about it, fashion is silly at times. It’s also provocative, upending, challenging and meaningful. It’s breathtaking. It’s beautiful.”

He’s right. Fashion can be all those things and more, all at once. And isn’t there a political purpose in beauty, anyway? It’s hopeful; it says life is worth showing up for. I’m not surprised that post-pandemic, people couldn’t wait to dress up again, sending sales of party dresses and high heels soaring. To wear something solely because it’s beautiful is a gesture of respect not only to oneself but to the world around us.

Another thing I’m familiar with in my role as a fashion editor is the need to defend the existence of fashion. I’m armed with retorts for the skeptics: It’s an industry that employs millions of people globally. It’s an art; if we’re not to question the purpose of a Beethoven symphony or a Picasso painting, I don’t see why we should a Valentino gown. Fashion is more than just clothes; it’s a megaphone and an expression of self. It’s about saying we want to be seen, but also heard.

In anxious times, it’s easy to feel silenced, but fashion can help amplify the voices we do have. Will a pretty blouse make you go to a polling place? No. Does buying a handbag replace grassroots activism? Again, nope. But can fashion help shape the world for the better? Yes, I like to think it can.

Even today, not everyone has the right to wear what they want, how they want. It’s still a privilege to dress with freedom. Yes, fashion can be silly, but there’s also sincerity and substance to be found within that silliness. To think it isn’t political is to miss the point entirely. 

Read this article as it appears in the magazine.

The post Inside the Undeniable Politics of Fashion appeared first on Artful Living Magazine.

From the Pages

Inside the Big Business of Wellness

Is the ballooning trillion-dollar wellness industry still on the rise — or is it about to burst?

By Marisa Petrarca
Illustration by Eden Redpath
September 20, 2021

Contrary to popular belief, the art of living well is wildly uncomplicated. Daily exercise, ample sleep and stress management go a long way in helping us feel our best. But sugarcoat it and wrap it in something shiny, and you have the booming wellness market, valued at $4.5 trillion globally. Adaptogenic drinks, CBD skincare and high-tech yoga mats are just a small sampling of the endless items vying for our attention — and our dollars — all in the name of self-care.

The wellness industry’s growth didn’t happen overnight; it’s steadily garnered interest year after year. But 2020 sped up demand. The coronavirus pandemic turned the page to a never-before-seen chapter, one that pushed both healthcare and self-care — two sides of the same coin — to the forefront of our minds and our daily conversations.

Illustration by Eden Redpath

So has the super-saturated market helped us get well? In a word: Maybe. Luxe leggings and LED face masks won’t make it happen on their own, though. Wellness, after all, transcends all the stuff we can buy. It’s about making positive lifestyle choices and not overindulging in not-so-great ones, like energy drinks as a substitute for sleep.

Today’s definition of self-care actually isn’t all that different than in decades past. Just look to the father of wellness, Halbert L. Dunn, MD, who laid the foundation for the modern-day movement. Back in the 1950s, he introduced the concept as “a condition of change in which the individual moves forward, climbing toward a higher potential of functioning.” Seems simple enough, right?

Wellness went mainstream in the 21st century, having been largely viewed as a fringe woo-woo fad up until that point thanks to its ancient and spiritual origins. Once solely synonymous with centuries-old disciplines (think Ayurveda and homeopathy), it transitioned from niche to normal as we sought out new ways to take control of our health.

Fast-forward to today: The big business of wellness is thriving, but it’s riddled with flaws. Although there are devotees aplenty, skeptics say it’s a bubble that’s about to burst. That it’s diet culture in disguise. That it’s not inclusive, nor diverse. That companies are stamping “wellness” onto all kinds of items for profit. In fact, there’s even an entire anti-wellness movement calling for an overhaul of the industry and a reframing of how we approach well-being.

So what does wellness look like when you pull apart its thousand-piece puzzle? And is the trillion-dollar market really helping us get well? Or is it actually doing more harm than good?

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The Digital Revolution

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Remember crowded fitness studios? Crammed spin classes? In-your-face instructors? The very thought is unnerving for those of us who have wholeheartedly embraced the digital wellness revolution. When gyms closed, we justified splurging on tech-driven fitness, making room in our homes for Peloton bikes and trying out newer devices like social media darling Mirror, which has seen sales more than double throughout the pandemic (to the tune of $150 million in Q3 2020 alone). Plus plenty of us turned to our screens to get our sweat on. Fitness and wellness booking resource Mindbody saw a 68% increase in users tuning into live-streamed workout sessions compared with pre-pandemic stats.

And innovations transcend our fitness routine. Words like “telehealth” and “telecounseling” have started dominating our vernacular. Virtual healthcare models such as Teladoc and PlushCare allow for more convenient, more affordable and just plain easier access to healthcare. Last year, nearly half of U.S. patients opted for telehealth appointments instead of in-person ones, according to consulting firm McKinsey & Company.

Even as the world returns to some semblance of normalcy, the digital revolution rages on, offering ample — not to mention free or low-cost — benefits across all facets of wellness. Virtual appointments, online classes and smartphone apps have made educational resources and support services more accessible for all. And people are putting them to good use.

Consider Yale’s popular online course, The Science of Well-Being. It’s amassed 3.5 million sign-ups and counting since its inception in 2018 — a million of which emerged during the height of the pandemic. Mental health apps like Calm, Headspace and Meditopia jumped 24%, surging by two million more downloads than expected in April 2020. And Exhale, a first-of-its-kind emotional well-being app designed by and for BIWOC, paves the way for people of color to access specially tailored resources.

As the stats show, wellness and technology have become irrevocably intertwined, and only time will tell if we’re willing to go back to our IRL ways. But as industry-altering innovations move beyond the Zoom era, companies will need to be uber strategic to win over our time, attention and dollars. Having spent so much of the past 18 months engrossed in our devices, we need something unlike what we’ve seen before.

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The Trend Report

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Wellness sells — and it’s not cheap. When CBD stormed onto the scene, it became an industry mainstay, valued at $2.8 billion in 2020. Now, it’s everywhere. There are cannabidiol-infused gummies, moisturizers, bath bombs — you name it. Hell, even Martha Stewart has jumped on the bandwagon with her own line (Canopy, if you’re so inclined).

This highlights the fact that we’re desperate for anything that might make our lives more livable. Amid an unprecedented health crisis, the wellness sector’s rumored benefits permeated the public consciousness. Google searches for “self-care” reached an all-time high last May. And the slew of trends that followed will define the times: gallon-sized water bottles, fancy air purifiers, jade facial rollers, stress-relief gummies and mushroom-based everything.

But not every craze sticks or ages well. Remember, for instance, the teatoxes and appetite suppressant lollipops that dominated social media in 2018? Other trends like plant-based eating and microbiome skincare — sectors rich with research and interest — have earned more permanent places in the market.

One of the buzziest products of the moment is Sakara’s Detox Water Drops chlorophyll supplement. In May, sales doubled overnight. The reason? TikTok. People took to the social media platform in droves to rave about the product’s supposed do-it-all benefits: weight loss, clearer skin, improved digestion and the like. At the time of writing, it’s unavailable yet again, with only an option to sign up for the waitlist.

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The Accountability Factor

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We’ve seen the claims: Detox your body. Reduce your anxiety. Boost your immune system. Countless goods promise quick fixes. But investing in unproven products is a gamble. The road to getting well is woefully riddled with deception, yet the wellness industry is profiting all the same.

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The demand for accountability is alarmingly dire, and — without getting overly political here — the problem starts at the top. In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Trade Commission are tasked with ensuring products are safe and live up to their claims. Unfortunately, these agencies’ regulatory power is stymied by red tape. The result? All too often, products with questionable claims and ingredients still end up on the marketplace — and, in turn, in thousands of virtual shopping carts.

Take, for example, Gwyneth Paltrow’s multimillion-dollar empire, Goop. Perhaps the most notable — and controversial — wellness brand of our time, it’s no stranger to false advertising lawsuits. In 2018, the company paid out $145,000 for unfounded claims that its vaginal jade eggs could restore hormonal balance and regulate menstrual cycles. Despite this, Goop has sold thousands of them and they’re still available for purchase today (minus the jargon that got the brand in hot water).

Mystery piques curiosity, even in the case of vaginal jade eggs. It’s one reason wellness wares sell without strict regulations, which is part of the problem. “The more simple human needs are being complicated by the health and wellness sector, the more people are getting confused and looking for answers in the wrong places,” says Global Wellness Day founder Belgin Aksoy.

This is tragically true for those living with chronic diseases or mental or physical disabilities. Not only are their actual needs regularly ignored by the industry, but they’re also often victims of marketing ploys. Brands sell them false promises under the guise of sound advice — “Have you tried a gluten-free diet? Pilates? Celery juice?” — which is not only deceitful but verges on dangerous.

Accountability goes far beyond the need for safe ingredients and regulated claims. Not only do we deserve transparency, we also deserve to feel fully represented. As we’ve seen over the past 18 months, the wellness industry has a diversity and inclusion problem. And these days, action is essential to earn our trust; black squares on Instagram and empty promises to do better won’t cut it.

To that end, UOMA Beauty’s Sharon Chuter last summer launched the #PullUpOrShutUp campaign to pressure beauty and wellness companies to release data about the number of people of color on staff. Today, the Instagram account @PullUpForChange remains active, sharing updates about brands’ progress. 

Alas, there remains a lot of work to be done. But we, the consumers, have the power to hold companies accountable. It’s time to educate ourselves and move forward, looking out for one another along the way.

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The Anti-Wellness Movement

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“Your bad habits can kill you, but your good habits won’t save you,” cultural critic Fran Lebowitz opines in her Netflix docuseries Pretend It’s a City. Touché, Fran. This is essentially the elevator pitch for the anti-wellness movement (of which she’s a part): You don’t have to buy into the market to be the best version of yourself.

Anti-wellness supporters ask, When you remove the money, products and healthism hoopla from the equation, what are you left with?  They propose that living well doesn’t necessitate buying items stamped with the word “wellness.”

That said, being anti-wellness isn’t as dramatic as it sounds. Nor is it as extreme as never purchasing essential oils or weighted blankets again. Rather, advocates remain unseduced by clever marketing schemes and are pushing for a wellness revolution.

The movement may be quiet, but it’s gaining momentum. Podcasts, documentaries and social media accounts have cropped up to alert the public of the industry’s shortcomings — and its potential dangers. Among them is Chronic By HuffPost, a podcast focused on what wellness means for the chronically unwell. It’s hosted by HuffPost UK editor Lucy Pasha-Robinson, who herself battled endometriosis and asserts that “wellness culture is ableism in sheep’s clothing.”

She’s one of the many challenging the industry to move away from its ableist messaging: Cure your depression! Get rid of inflammation! Cleanse your way to better health! This kind of language implies that living well and living with chronic illness, which affects some 133 million Americans, are mutually exclusive.

And who’s to say what makes you feel good? Consider the recent rage room phenomenon. At places like the Break Bar and Just Smash It, you can bust old televisions and ceramic dishes to your heart’s desire. Although it may seem like the antithesis of a meditative yoga session, it’s therapeutic to some.

All things considered, these anti-wellness supporters just might be onto something in their quest for a wellness revolution. After all, it sure is ironic that we as a nation are so obsessed with wellness, yet we’re famously unwell.

The post Inside the Big Business of Wellness appeared first on Artful Living Magazine.